Tuesday. Lights out early enough to awaken just after six this morning, feeling just fine. None of yesterdays “what in the hell's going on?” business. Up and out the door with all three papers in tow, the sky overcast and the weather people saying it will be cooler this week, but no rain except here and there and probably not here. So there. Good. The mood if not the exposition.

The avocado and cheese (light on the cheese), country potatoes, fruit cup and coffee for breakfast to have something different. It didn't call out to me, but then it didn't put me off either. The usual food doesn't matter attitude, even when you know you're hungry.

A woman stopped me as I was leaving the restaurant and taking the morning picture of the gas station sign across the street and she asked me why I'd been taking a picture of it every day, challenging me to come up with an answer I've not been able to comfortably come up with for myself. The usual “well I started taking them back when they were volatile and I've just kept on taking them out of habit”. Lame, but it makes you pull your head together to come up with something better the next person who might ask. If there is another such person other than myself.

Anyway, a walk back home taking a larger than usual number of pictures to then be passed by this guy with his tattooed arms and legs. Took the second picture if only to blow it up later to see what he'd chosen to define himself for the rest of his existence. The whole package makes a kind of cartoonish sense. Give the guy credit.

Later. A walk to the lake with an even larger lens on the camera, looking for cormorants again, but none of the less than dozen I found were busy searching out nest building materials and so made do with a pelican that suddenly appeared and then a small sparrow-like fellow who flew up and landed near where I was standing, much like yesterday's pair of Mallards. So pictures.

Clear skies and sun and so back to the apartment to do the usual stuff, feeling good, the head clear while processing today's pictures and interminably listening to the news. It's gotten to the point reading the morning papers is just a rehash of stories already heard.

Evening. And that's been the day. A decent day, sun, good temperature, but spent inside with tablet and television, adding this the next morning as, for all my protestations of “clear headedness”, the head doesn't seem willing to write in the late afternoons and evenings. Or edit. Or, perhaps (dear lord) care. There's only so much blame you can put on screwed up sinuses as the cause and begin to understand this may well be reality from here on out. Makes you want to reconsider your attitude toward alcohol.