Back from breakfast at the usual place, the head reasonably clear. No vertigo or such, but we'll see when I get to San Francisco how that decides to play itself out. No real concerns, no complaints. If the world starts to turn I'll find a coffee shop and sit for a while sipping coffee and eating a chocolate donut. Well, a chocolate muffin. There's a distinct difference between a donut and a muffin, maybe more class related than anything to do with sugar. Are muffins more genteel than donuts? Eating a chocolate muffin, particularly if they're quite small as are the ones I found at a local café recently, is much more acceptable than eating a chocolate donut, don't you think? Night and day? Or have I stretched this beyond sensibility?

Actually, it has a faint ring of truth. Class differences, cultural differences.

Indeed. Would snarky remarks about policemen be quite so snarky if they were described as sitting in their cars eating muffins? Little girls in ribbons share muffins over miniature tea cups in the summer out on their lawns, they don't share donuts. Or is the comparison a masculine-feminine thing? Do real men eat muffins? This is rapidly developing scatological dimensions, back to less slippery ground.

Later. A no vertigo - no complaints outing. How long has it been since I've had one like this? A bus and then BART to Montgomery Street letting me out right on 2nd and Market, the parade forming up in front of me when I arrived before ten, an hour's shooting, back on BART as the parade was heading up Market at eleven. A small parade, a small crowd, covering wars from WWII through our current debacles. More focus on the earlier conflicts than the more recent and including, what I was thinking, were non military groups such as Falun Gong (Falun Gong veterans? Marching in China one day, maybe, I have no doubt.)

A cup of iced coffee and a ginger muffin at Peet's (having missed the bus by two minutes), a bus back now at the apartment. Two cameras in tow, one with a standard range zoom and one with the 135mm f 2.0 instead of the much bigger 70 - 200mm which has in the past been my usual choice. I used the 135mm all the time with film and find I'm using it again recently with the full frame digital. Too old and frail to be packing the 70 - 200? Maybe. Still, very comfortable today, no complaints. My, my.

You had a ginger rather than a chocolate muffin?

Peet's doesn't have the little golf ball size chocolate muffins I've learned to like. The café that sells them isn't open on Sundays. Still, ginger this morning did the trick.

Later still. I'm OK with these photographs now that I've had a chance to look at them, but I suspect taking the heavier 70 - 200mm lens would have made them better. Such is life. My 70 - 200mm has been supplanted with a new one, some reviews suggesting it's much better. My own experience has been the one I have, if it has limits, they're limits far beyond my own ability or desire to reach them. But I'm thinking of getting the new one when it's available. I'm crazy. Really.