Monday. Bright sun, cool and crisp, but not cold this morning on the way to breakfast at six-thirty after a good night's sleep. Back now, the sun now higher on the horizon, brighter, thinking I'd like to get out and about, but also thinking I'd better wait on the FedEx delivery. I've got a soft case coming for the guitar, much lighter than the hard case, something to transport it to the Wednesday morning lessons. I mentioned carrying the damned thing in the hard case last week when I didn't have the car and I ordered it that morning when I got back to the apartment.

Extravagant, you might say, but not very. I rationalize purchases more easily when they're not “expensive”. Now what's not “expensive”? I'd assume the definition changes with the weather, the outlook, the phases of the moon and, more rarely, the state of the bank account. Ah, yes. The state of the bank account. At least it no longer requires much in the way of mathematics to do the figures.

Thank your stars there isn't another camera coming out of Nikon.

Bite your tongue. We'll upset the camera gods. Not good to upset the camera gods. Not in the month before Christmas. Not here in Oakland.

The baseball game turned out well last night, interesting game, and I got in quite a bit of practice. Focus on running the scales, my bucko, take your pleasure from plucking them in order, don't worry that you can't yet play a decent tune. It will come, it will come. He said. No complaints, this little mantra is generally comforting. I have the blues channel running in the background at the moment and the guitar players are doing things and making sounds that have no relationship to what I've been doing, what I've been playing, but the conceit is we'll learn with enough time. Lots of time. So we'll work on our scales. And chords. And persevere. Would have been nice to have known this when I was pursuing my hobbies as a kid, but I didn't, as many didn't. Then again what else is new?

Are you suggesting you'd have built better model airplanes had you known?

For starters. For starters.

Later. I've been sitting here trying to get Roxio Creator 2011 to work. It won't recognize my external DVD burner hooked to the computer through a firewire connection and it runs so slowly I thought it might be counting in minutes rather than seconds. Creator 7 running on XP worked OK, saw the same firewire drive with no problem, but I'm wondering if this new Windows 7 system has a device driver issue with the drive as it doesn't appear on the list when you bring up Windows Explorer. Except I did install firewire drivers. Hmm. I suspect anyone who uses any set of programs, no matter how well known and used in certain groups (photographers being one), will have one or two programs with issues running on a new operating system. Still, the disk copying software? I have Vista on my laptop, don't much like it, gambled on Windows 7. Windows 7 (64 bit) seemed the better choice, but it seems to have its own issues and it's been dishing out pain in my re-education effort. Stop, please.

FedEx came last Friday at two-forty in the afternoon when I was ten minutes out of the apartment and I suspect they'll come around the same time this afternoon. The day outside is nice and it's calling, but we'll stay here until it arrives. I order too much crap. I suspect I'd order groceries if I did any grocery shopping (Safeway has a service they advertise locally). Maybe one day if I'm not longer able to drive.

This isn't going in a good direction.

A less lazy man would go back and do something called edit.

Later still. A walk down to Coffee With A Beat for a sandwich and a cup of coffee out on the sidewalk after the soft guitar case arrived. The thing came in a box that must have been five feet tall and three feet wide, the cloth guitar case inside weighing all of five pounds. I wonder how they make money on something like this? Probably get a good deal on cardboard. I'd guess.

The Roxio backup software really doesn't work. The product description on Amazon has a number of user comments to the effect the software is crap and I just added my own two cents. Pain in the neck. Pain in the something. I can still boot this thing into Windows XP and burn backups, but we live in a complicated world where it gets wiggy out near the edges. So many edges.

You'd think using a Microsoft operating system wouldn't push you out to the edge. Well, what am I saying? Windows? Not working? Has this never before happened? Old man? Wake up! We live in interesting times. Wiggy Windows. Wiggy now and forever.

So we shall chill. We shall practice our guitar. We shall work on our chords. And we will look at backing up our files tomorrow. On Windows XP. I'm guessing.