Monday. To bed by ten to awaken half an hour before six. No particular adverse (need a nap! need a nap!) effects so far from this, losing half an hour, just, you know, noticing. A leisurely get up and get ready to walk to breakfast, heading out the door on a cool overcast morning, the overcast holding on the way home and now through the morning as it approaches eleven.

The idea was to take the car to the dealer for a routine service (it was due for a routine service two months ago) and get a SMOG check in order to renew the license, but I've been wondering since yesterday if I'd end up putting it off (again). Didn't put it off again.

Drove to the dealer (a routine service has for some time now not come at a routine cost: two hundred dollars to replace the spark plugs because they're platinum plated? Really?) and dropped off the car, walked then around the corner to have the blood drawn for the Protime blood thinner test, caught a bus to the ATM on Broadway and walked home, feeling just fine, thank you. Except for the “routine reaming”, excuse me, routine car servicing. More than the car is being serviced.

You don't have to have it done by the dealer.

I'm thinking more I really don't need to own a car what with such as Uber and car shares and the like.

Later. Feeling a little funky when picking up the car. They'd called saying they had a problem with the SMOG test as “the monitor needed resetting” and so it was going to cost another close to a hundred more to get it done, but it would be ready after three and so I set out to pick it up, digging out my credit card to make payment. Except I gave the mechanic the bank card and not the Visa card and so I suspect “fuzzy headed” would have been a better description than the more generic funky. Anyway, I managed to cancel the bank card transaction before it was completed and substitute the needed credit card, but how fried a brain does that imply?

And your driving? Fried head behind the wheel in traffic?

Driving was fine, the however muddy headed brain was functioning just fine while driving, but still. Paying for whatever at a counter seems to bring these things on more often than in any other situation, maybe life is trying to tell me something I should know.

Evening. Nothing on television, I'm afraid. The PBS stations, two of them anyway, are raising money and Charlie Rose is devoting the hour to Muhammad Ali. I have no problem with Ali, but I've listened to and read as many stories about his life as I need to see or read at the moment. I was much impressed with Mohammad Ali when I was in college, essentially throwing it all up, taking a very real chance he was throwing it all away, to protest the Vietnam war. Courage and integrity of a kind you didn't find, black or white.

And so another up and down odd day, maybe now the norm, comes to an end. Life goes along whether we approve of its path or not, with or without our approval.