That's reasonably icky.

I suppose. Be a shame to finally get back to feeling pretty damned well again and discover you've turned into more of an asshole than you were teetering at the edge of bed. But these things happen. They make good stories. Not good enough for reality television, from what I'm currently seeing (in the press), but progress of a kind.

Now we've gone from icky to gibberish.

We have. That's why you practice. Mastering gibberish is another sign of progress here in, well, you know.

You don't practice anything.

I'm retired. I don't plan on learning about “practice” until I take up the guitar again.

You've never played a guitar.

Exactly.

Later. I ran this picture yesterday and my sister commented she thought the little girl looked like she had the flu. Well, she was clearly a bit freaked (in a positive sense) about skating and that's what I was seeing when I took the picture. Here are two others taken in the sequence, maybe they together give the impression of learning to skate rather than trying not to hurl. I don't usually take pictures of small children, but I couldn't pass this one up. The reflection of the light off the shaded ice is nice and I'm thinking of returning and taking the time to shoot it properly in the same late morning light (maybe when that camera and lens arrive!). But I prattle.

A walk somewhere later, I think. The last day of this four day weekend. Feels good. Feels like a holiday, four days away from work, even for those who aren't employed. I wouldn't surprise me if you never got over feeling this way, no matter how long since you'd last seen an office. Sounds nice.

Later still. A bus downtown, a coffee and a scone out on the patio in front of Peet's after getting off the bus and walking up from the Sear's store on 20th along empty sidewalks, something a little different when you're walking on a Sunday morning, the area put in a different perspective. Passing the statue on the edge of Frank Ogawa Plaza again, taking a picture of it again, not sure I should have included the building on the right. These things happen. You experiment. A walk back then from Peet's, a slow without being too slow walk, a couple passing from behind, the Cormorants not drying themselves at their usual place, but the overflow from the rain in the last two days in evidence in the lake, another shot or two of trees with the sun behind them, I'm fixated on silhouetted trees for the time, I guess. No complaints, no thought though to work out a better angle or plan for catching them with better color in a different sun. But we've gone over that. Practice and such.

Back now at the apartment, twelve-thirty in the afternoon, the head relatively clear even if there's still a certain tiredness present. Check the blood pressure, sometimes it's the culprit, but it's running in the one-ten's over seventies. So that's not it. The lungs are loose. I've been doing the inhaler every day, maybe that's good, maybe that's not. The walking slowly has more to do with increasing my ability to see as I'm carrying a camera, I'm not getting tired in the physical sense. The upper right arm was a tad sore as I got home, I'm guessing a product of swinging the camera around the way other people carry little bar bell weights. All of that is to the good. So we'll see. I say that a lot: “we'll see”. And we will, if only for a moment, perhaps. No complaints.

Another Nikon battery seems to have gone south. I've lost one, maybe two before, the 2500 milliamp (2.5 amp) models that go for just under a hundred bucks. I'll replace it, but I'm wondering, with my usage, if this is normal. The camera reads the charge on the battery and warns you when it needs “recalibration”, a charge, complete discharge, routine that you can select on the charger and requires many hours to complete. But that doesn't seem to be it. This one? I don't know when I bought it, I have one for each of the cameras in addition to a number of extra 1900 milliamp batteries when they were the standard. Such is life. I'll ask some of the others who use these things when I see them next.

It's two in the afternoon. I've written enough. Some might say too much.