Its pretty much the holiday season right now and that makes for a curious mix of ups and downs.

The week has been hectic with a lot that needed to be done and a lot, for that matter, getting done. Coupled with the tasks at hand, the pressure is starting to tell on the folks involved, managers and troopers alike, and the Sole Proprietor, although on the periphery of all of this, is happy to have the weekend ahead. He's going to buy some memory for his computer, he's going to shoot some pictures and he's going to work on his web site unless he decides to put his feet up and vegetate, take some naps, drink some beer, eat a peach, fuck a duck or something equally laudatory and satisfying. You know the feeling, sometimes you need to pull the covers up and say goodbye for a while and maybe this weekend is one of them.

Not to go into a tailspin here, the Sole Proprietor isn't ready to enter a serious winter depression for some time yet. There's a little more socializing going on, people getting together and talking over the day, what's happening in the life and whether or not the weeks are going well. Lunches at nicer places than you'd normally eat, doing things like visiting the family, not altogether without stress, but still, a break in the routine to see how many times the world has turned and how many lives have changed since the last go around.

The leaves in the banner picture are on a tree in front of the Pacific Coast Brewery, a pub near the Sole Proprietor's office. There was a time when he got together with folks from the company on a regular basis at PCB, drinking, but not too much drinking, talking into the evening, a little flirting, sometimes dinner afterward, often times not. That doesn't happen anymore. Most of the people he knew back then are gone now, those remaining becoming more distant as people sometimes do over time. He can see why its not altogether a bad idea to change your employment every now and then, at least in companies that reinvent themselves from year to year through attrition and resizing and all the rest if only to start fresh with folks who don't quite yet know the terrible truth and some time on their hands to find out.

This isn't so bad. When we focus on the death of times, and certainly the winter is a death of times, we forget about the birth that follows, the Phoenix (squeak! squeak!) arising from the ashes. All this year he's half had his eye on a goal, not as well defined as it should be, but a goal none the less, a place he wants to be by Spring. And its happening. It's cold outside and sometimes the Sole Proprietor feels cold inside, but there's a future there, different than he imagined it might be five years ago, ten years ago, or twenty years ago, but a future none the less with a time and a style and a warmth and a cold all its own, one to be embraced, after all, given the alternative.

The pictures are of people from the company taken during the last week. He will post a bunch more over the weekend under the "This Week's Photographs" section now in the planning. These are some of the faces of a changing company, some of them old, some of them new with the Sole Proprietor feeling somewhat distant from them all at the moment a part, perhaps, of the times, a part, perhaps of a need for a good night's sleep.

He likes shooting these pictures, people who have forgotten for a moment that there's some idiot with a camera in the room, who relax for a moment and the Sole Proprietor can get it on film. That in itself has a life and a rhythm of its own and, right now, its busy being born.