The morning is good, the sun is out, Daylight Savings is in place and my paper delivery people evidently weren't able to get out of bed and deliver either the morning Chronicle or the Tribune on time. So we got to our morning café a little later than usual, later on the clock anyway, and we ate breakfast alone except for the one other customer who comes in on Sunday mornings. I'm not sure this is a good sign for the economy, certainly not the best sign I could imagine for my morning café. We'll see. The year is young. Many more financial shoes to drop before we put this behind us is my guess, not that my guess is worth more than the two cents worth of time it took to write it. I do occasionally remind myself of that.

And speaking of shoes dropping, my new “tight” shoes have become new “snug” shoes. They are indeed loosening up and I suspect I'll be able to break them in and wear them after all. Another crucial consideration, my too tight shoes, right up there with the economy and war in the wherever it is we're fighting a war at the moment.

The Pladdohg CD gig went well. Lafayette, it turns out, is just down the way, a fifteen minute drive. The place was packed, standing room only, so we had dinner in the adjoining dining room and listened to the gig over sushi and Guinness. I'm liking the CD, they really did what was needed to get it right. I popped it in the player on the way home and went through as many cuts as you can on a fifteen minute drive, two Guinness and sushi to the wind, on an evening in Lafayette, east of Oakland.

Later. A quiet morning, probably because everyone else decided to get up at their usual hour, to hell with this Daylight Savings crap, put it off until tomorrow. No half measures, just sleep your usual hours and take the heat in the Monday morning rush. Gives the early morning to idiots crazy enough to set their alarms an hour ahead and eat their collective breakfasts over their newspapers without distraction (and take a two hour nap when they get back as I've just done). I don't have a Monday morning rush unless I make a mistake with one of my morning medications.

A walk in the early afternoon to the local ATM, no thought to take a bus and use the one in the City Center, taking the odd picture as I ambled along. None of them turned out, the pictures, but I was happy enough with the way the eye was searching, stretching to make something happen. A walk then to the morning café for a light lunch, passing this sign thinking how do I make the pigeons stand out (without success), another photograph of a window display - Why do I take these? I'm a sucker for store window mannequins and such. - and an attempt to do something or other with a palm frond lying in the park.

Another nap, perhaps? The head a little buzzed, but no more so than yesterday's buzzed. Is buzzed the new norm, only to be noticed when it takes another step to wherever it's eventually headed? I'm becoming more convinced I'm simply following a normal path that leads to sitting on a park bench under a warm sun, camera in lap, taking in the day's excitement. Best to be OK with that if that's what's happening, but maybe keep an eye out for ways around the outcome, watch for an escape hatch popping along the path big enough to fit through, camera too.