Walking back from breakfast this morning wondering why I'm feeling so tired, more so certainly than when I walked in. The usual thoughts and connotations until I got home, sat down at the computer and dialed into the real world, the sun getting warmer, the air getting warmer but so what?

The Chronicle ran an article this morning describing the current generation of youngsters and how many of them have never been camping, don't want to go camping, would rather spend the day at the mall. I mean bugs. Who needs bugs? Who needs the boredom of being out in a bunch of trees in a cell phone dead zone? What perceptive people this younger generation seems to be. I've always admired Ms. M's remark (back when she was Ms. G) that her idea of camping out was checking into a Howard Johnson's. Indeed.

Did I camp out in the old days? I certainly did. I spent days walking alone through the second growth forest where I grew up north of Seattle, just me and the chipmunks. A big deal was camping out in the back yard (when we were really young), still a big deal when I moved here in the late sixties and spent weekends driving up the coast with Ms. K with a couple of sleeping bags. Today, though, with the web, well, I haven't done any camping in some time. And stories, like today's in The Chronicle: all this tsk! tsk! How rude this current generation of kids. They said the same about mine and everyone else's, come to think of it. I myself, clever self, will occasionally go off the farm and frown when a cell phone is used in a restaurant, even when it happens at my funky (who cares?) morning café, but I'm an old fart. I get testy in lines. I don't stand in lines, I bail out of lines unless it's a line at Beverages and More and I'm out of sake. I'm not so old I can no longer keep my priorities straight.

So it's late October, November coming, the temperature in the eighties, a long cold winter of fifty degree days and forty degree nights coming closer. Time to lay in some goodies for the winter, put my feet up on the table in front of the computer and scan the stories in the paper describing our bombing and fighting and dying in Iran and Iraq. But that's just me being cranky. Were I an Iraqi or an Iranian a comment like that would not be possible in a world where there are end of the rainbow winters and there are Iraqi and Iranian warfare winters and saying it doesn't mean I know.

We aren't at war with Iran.

I know, I know.