Sunday. OK, up this morning with the alarm at six with some semblance of reality seemingly in control (we'll have to keep an eye on that), a good start on an overcast but rainless morning. To breakfast and back not long after eight, the Oakland marathon running at the moment, the first wave of runners due down on Grand at the bottom of my hill in couple of hours. At least that's that way it ran last year where I took a number of pictures of runner's faces in various stages of distress. Boring set of pictures, at some level, runner after runner, not a set I necessarily want to repeat, but then we'll see if we can't find another more clever approach. No way I'm going to have a marathon pass my apartment without giving it a shot. Or two. Doodle-dee-do.

I did get in the guitar practice yesterday, which is good. Friday was a no go, what with the MRI and then the night on the town. We'll make further progress today I think. Not sure the playing is any better, it improves in spurts, but the attitude remains good, progress has been made even with all the hup! hup! hups!

Makes you suspicious when people talk about how well the world is working for them with a particular this or that. Makes me suspicious anyway as I do go on about this practice business. Am I bullshitting myself? Basically I'm guessing you need to get positive feedback by going through scales and chords (over and over and over and over) daily for an hour or so. Some reasonable period of time daily, I made up the hour bit. If that gets you off, you're OK, and one sunny day you may hear yourself playing actual music. Which (I'm assuming) will be nice. When I get there. In another year. Or more.

Later. No rain. Overcast mostly, a bit of sun now and again earlier when I walked down the hill and photographed the runners as they came up along the edge of the lake. All this took less than an hour.

Back to the apartment to go through the photographs and put them up on artandlife. Just like that. I discovered I had an earlier section started but only half populated, so I finished it out with some recent photographs and then created two more sections with the marathon photos. A bunch of pictures of people running. I mentioned there might be a certain, um, “sameness” to them, but I'm into facial expressions and, when you're running a marathon, you're not expending any energy to maintain your public face. Which is good. For me. Deedle-dee-dee.

It's now just before six after a long afternoon in Photoshop and HTML. Not hard, not overly complicated (I've done this sort of thing before), but it takes time, it does.

Later still. Getting into the evening having spent some time now on the guitar. Scales and chords, chords and scales and something new called “hammer on's and pull off's” which require my fingers to do things they weren't designed to do. They say practice will teach (stretch, twist, curl, twist) them in the ways they need to know. OK. “Hammer on's and pull off's”. Who would'a known?