It is a Friday, there must be something going on out there to tickle the interest. Why haven't I been over to S.F. to at least scope out the America's Cup trials? A question I've asked more than once. I don't want to pack along a great heavy telephoto lens, but I could take pictures of whatever activities I might find, see something that kindles an interest.

But you won't.

I'm afraid you might be right.

Later. Best to be heading up to the family gathering in Seattle next week as I've clearly gone dry. A walk over to the lake to take a disinterested (albeit bucolic) picture or two without an urge to be there at the lake or to go anywhere else. I'd checked the web to see where The Lone Ranger was playing, the not doing well new Johnny Depp vehicle, found it playing at the Jack London Square theater and, well, decided not to go. When's the last time I've been to a movie? Can't remember.

So we go north on the train next week, obviously a much needed break, something to shake out the dust. Our epitaph? Dust? For the month? The year? Oh dear?

Later still. A bus downtown to the City Center just after one, the area still crowded with people finishing their lunch, so on through the farmers market to the Asian Cultural Center to sit out by the fountain with an ice cream cone (two scoops), then back to the City Center for a rye bagel and coffee. The sun was nice, there was a cool breeze (just right in shirt sleeves), so a bus back to the apartment to check the mail and glance at the guitar. The guitar is glancing back. It knows me too well.

Evening. Getting up from another nap (no sleep, but zoning out while listening to the radio turned down low in the late afternoon for about an hour), getting up thinking, well, I haven't taken my blood pressure in months, maybe it's running low, maybe it's something as simple as that being out of whack and causing this tiredness as it has in the past.

Of course, getting up after an hour lying down, you'd think it would read low, but it read 102 over 67. Low, but not so low as to be the problem. I'll take it again tomorrow. Easy to space out and forget to recheck things you thought were fixed. For me, anyway. Forgetting, like everything else, improves with practice.

A Detective Montalbano at six, which I find impossible to watch (and, in checking the beginning, discovered I'd seen it), so Democracy Now and then another British detective thing, brought out of retirement cops solving old cases, which I'm usually able to manage. What's the standard caricature? A crotchety old man who crabs on and on about current entertainment? Learning it's true by finding you've turned into one? From hip and cool to crotchety in the matter of what seems to have been but a minute?

This was followed by yet another English/British detective program, Dalziel and Pasco, that's playing as we're whinging here at the computer. I've had difficulty these last years in warming to detective programs set in upper-middle-lower class clashing university settings, gave up altogether on Detective Morse for example, but we'll know soon enough how we'll react to this one. The signature feature of the main detective character so far seems to be he's rude, but cleverly rude, to his suspects and subordinates. Thin ice from the sound of it.

So we'll say things go well in the mornings while heading to breakfast and back, similarly in the evenings, the walks and the ennui filling the void in between. Ennui's about right: bored, too much time on your hands, tired. Ennui mixed with crotchety may explain this month better than a (crotchety old man) is willing to admit to the world.