On then, when I returned, to the Lakeview school pictures having made fair progress yesterday, so three sections of Lakeview photographs posted today in addition to the four sections I posted to the Gay Pride Parade yesterday, making for an unusually busy weekend.

I guess we're heading into uncharted territory with all the time we're spending with photography, but it seems to be working well enough, the attitude is (fill in the blank: good, upbeat, better) and, given that I don't seem to think much about exploring other alternatives, well, we're pretty much just going to go with it. Everyone plays in their own little sandbox making mud pies with their own little imaginations, mine isn't all that much different from any of the rest. I don't think.

Where did that come from?

Now and then I wonder about, well, not so much about obsessive behavior (it's obsessive, but not that obsessive, right?) as we are a bit limited here in our scope now, are we not? Not enough variety in the mix? When the photography goes badly it results in upbeat thinking about how to make it better, no thoughts so far after a bad outing about jumping ship or jumping off a ship or.... Well, you get the drift. Still....

I mentioned some months back I'd gotten a network mirrored hard drive to back up all the photographs, a system where you make a backup copy of all your files on the mirrored pair every now and then and store that separate drive off site. And, embarrassingly, the drive I'd first gotten ran out of disk space this month. So I installed another one today that's now sitting beside the first one, running the mirroring routine on it last night (six hours to initiate mirroring, four terabytes of storage becoming a mirrored disk of two), so we're set for another couple of years. For another year. For however long it decides to give me, factoring in my penchant for errors in planning.

So that too is good: a sunny day, plenty of safe storage, no errors taping it all together, no broken disk mirror parts to sit in a corner gathering dust. Now on to the Lakeview school photographs so I can catch up on my guitar practice. Hup!

Later. A walk to the morning restaurant for a glass of lemonade, a walk back taking but one or two desultory thoroughly disposable pictures. The Lakeside photographs are obviously done and posted to both HereInOakland and ArtAndLife, they didn't take more to finish than a couple of hours, back now at the apartment staring at the guitar.

Well, I'm not staring at the guitar. The guitar and I continue our good relationship. I find, if I get involved in a project that throws my schedule off, that it's harder for me to spend the full time I want to spend on practice. That's not quite sitting and “staring”. We're still in a good relationship, but again, disruptions do disrupt.

Later still. A Maigret this evening at six, a thoroughly unbelievable story of deviltry and intrigue, yet I find it interesting. The actual plot, the mechanism of the deed and the way it's eventually discovered, doesn't seem to matter much. It's more the tone and interaction between the protagonists that captures the interest, although I'm sure there are writers who specialize in clever (and believable?) plots who are out there balancing the equation. None of whom at the moment come to mind. Many things these days take more than a moment to come to mind.

Anyway, a bit jumpy or, at least, verging on jumpy this evening, a walk down to the 7-11 look-alike for an ice cream cone and their smallest bottle of Jack Daniels (three shots of whiskey: more expensive, but it keeps you from having four) to consume over a period of two hours while on the guitar. Doesn't have the kick of my usual two glasses of sake, but then it doesn't seem to have any of the less pleasant aftereffects. Not sure what that is about. Anyway, dangerous living, here in the shadow of the fabled Rainbow City, as we approach another Fourth of July.