Friday. Well, let's see: yesterday. Riding home on the bus in the late afternoon I noticed this tree had blown over in the wind and the rain. When? The night before? Earlier that day? Who knows, but it's not a small tree located right behind the bus stop at Perkins and Grand, a stop where I often get off not far from my apartment.

And the other excitement, not mentioned in yesterday's entry? Well, here we are, over $4.00 a gallon. Is this something I think about day in and day out? No, but it's a sign of the times, as people in my past had a habit of pointing out. We enter another new world, which is OK, but another world every day? Every week? Every month? You could get a skin rash just from the rush. Chapped lips. Sand in your eyes. Or, then again, maybe a heart attack, out here in the old folks home.

Awake this morning at six with the alarm, but staying in bed. Blink! It's eight-thirty! OK, we have an MRI in Redwood City scheduled for noon, but I'm to arrive two hours early at ten for a blood test. Where is Redwood City again? East bay? Across off 101? Hmm. Just north of Palo Alto. We'll see how long it takes to drive.

To cut to the chase I got there before ten, found my instructions to show up early for a blood test were wrong, they would normally do it just before putting into the tube for the MRI. Still, they understood it wasn't my fault, put in an I.V. and got me into the machine (for what must have been a full hour of scans - wonder how much radiation is involved in that) got me out again (a little dingy) and on my way back home before noon. I'm not overly fond of MRI's, I was obviously fighting it this morning failing to look up the route to the facility until just before I set out, but it and I are done. We'll see what they've found, but not until next week. We'll start thinking again next week.

Coming back I parked by my morning restaurant and had breakfast while reading the papers I'd taken with me in the car. I wasn't particularly hungry as such, although I'd not yet had anything to eat, but I needed a nice comfort food breakfast: an avocado and cheese omelette, country potatoes, toast and coffee. We are now back at the apartment before three, the weather doing a dance between intermittent hard rain and the sun breaking through scattered gaps in the clouds. Oh, and the price of gas that broke $4.00 yesterday went up another six cents a gallon this morning.

I think I'll manage a guitar session now, finish up that bottle of sake I started last night, get to bed early. There's some thought to going somewhere or other tomorrow to have a belated birthday celebration with a subset of the crew and we'll see how that turns out. Evidently the get together at Harrington's last night was an excuse to buy me a couple of birthday drinks. Oh, well. We're good. We're done with hospitals for the while. A weekend is coming. Nothing bad about that.