Monday. A mixed evening, I guess: to sleep after eleven, up this morning at six with the alarm. Back now from breakfast, no rain, they're saying clouds and sun for the next few days. Sounds OK to me. An appointment with the pulmonary doctor later this morning after nine. I've been totally off the various medications he started me on. I have some occasional congestion that lasts but a minute and clears with a cough. So we'll see what he has to say. Life in the 2011's. Let's hope it looks, if not better, then no worse, than the decade it follows.

Later. No progress forward, no falling back for the lungs. They haven't been the issue they were when I first went to the pulmonary doctor and so I wouldn't think or worry should they stay as they are. A bit of congestion in the mornings generally cleared by a cough (or two). We decided I'd come back in two months for another checkup after I'd seen the ocular neurologist and gotten a better handle on whatever it is driving this other stuff.

He said it isn't that you just fall apart at some point as you age. You tend to have more issues and you deal with them as they come. The sixty-five of two generations ago is the eighty-five of today. OK. I've heard that, we've all heard that, we can go with that if it's true.

The sun is out as we approach noon, the guitar is calling to me from its stand in the living room. Maybe I'll duck outside for a walk, avoid the guitar for another hour or so. Got to do those chords, practice that strumming. I've been practicing every day, but more the riffs and scales than chords, although even then the chords seem to be coming along. I'm moving faster from one to the other and seeing the glimmers of a time coming up when I can make the changes without particularly thinking on the beat. Not yet, but again, the thought has recently emerged such things may one day be done.

So again: Monday. The beginning of a week. A dentist's appointment first thing in the morning, a haircut on Wednesday. I'm thinking of just a trim, a balancing of what's there right now, let it grow a bit. I guess I'm coming to a decision on where the hair will sit for this next chapter in the life. Progress across many fronts. (Hup! Hup!)

Later still. I walk down to the bus stop. I walk back to the apartment from the bus stop. Where might the bus take me I really might like to go? A nap for about an hour. A session on some old negatives taken when I had an apartment in the mid-seventies up on Twin Peaks, a shot of the room divider with the stereo components. Did I ever really live there? How long ago was that? I still have some of those old components. You don't want to know what they cost back then in those dollars, you and I don't want to know what they would cost if you bought similar equipment today. No, really, we don't. I did play them for hours and hours, though. Days and days, nights and nights. Still occasionally do.

Another picture or two. Why am I willing to spend time on these? Where were they taken? Another nap, a walk then down and around the local area to clear the head, a cup of coffee out at a sidewalk table at Noah's thinking I'd like to pick up some sake for dinner. I talked myself out of the sake for dinner staring at the selection in Trader Joe's. What was that about?

So I guess I've described a funky afternoon, not because of the upper palate and such, we can't blame it on them, it's just, well, perhaps we're waiting on spring. My sister is planning to drive down from Portland to stay with our cousin in San Rafael toward the end of this month and then we'll set out so we can shoot some pictures. I've mentioned she'd become a photographer in this last year? I believe I did. Not sure where we'll go, but somewhere halfway exotic, somewhere the both of us can find and photograph our particular interests. That's coming up pretty quickly, come to think of it.

Otherwise, another session today after this morning's session on the guitar. Chords. I believe I've mentioned the chords. They need to be played. In some kind of recognizable rhythm. But then again, I believe I've mentioned this too, here in Oakland.