I got close to ten hours sleep last night, nine something anyway, hard to remember the exact time I dropped off. So I guess the body is spending what time it needs to keep our act together. Ten hours. Breakfast at nine-thirty, a walk back home with a camera in hand, the strap wrapped around the wrist, one or two images reached out to say I needed to take a picture. I have no idea if I even like them, although I went through the trouble to see them, to photograph them and run them through PhotoShop. That for me marks a good start to a day in Oakland.

They've been laying what their sign says is a 115k power cable down the middle of Grand Avenue for the last several weeks, a distance of about a mile. It's hard to understand the number of construction workers, security workers, clean up workers and the like it takes for a project like this. Gives you an idea of what damage an earthquake can cause in reconstruction hours. What would it take to rebuild a badly damaged city? What did it take to rebuild after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake? They still haven't finished retro-fitting the Oakland Bay bridge twenty years later, although traffic was restored in about a month. That's without counting the deaths involved. Deaths are cheaper (unless you're the one dying) from a public standpoint, I would guess, unless the cure for (your, my) cancer was rattling around in the head of one of the people flattened by their houses.

That's a little weird. Where'd that come from?

I have no idea. It just came out after passing all those construction workers as I was walking back from breakfast, that and remembering where I was (in Napa) during the Loma Prieta quake and how long they've been working on that bridge; how many mayors and governors and presidents have come and gone since then, since I was born. I was a bit freaked when I realized one day I was alive for the last two years of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. I can remember being very young and hearing them talk about Harry Truman's administration on the radio. Could be an old guy thing, realizing you have to reach to name in order the various presidents who've passed through since you were born. Scary, actually. All this walking by a construction site.

Later. Not that I'm deviating from any of my routines, you understand, but I've been spending time futzing with some of the elements Mr. Post sent me with his original artandlife design, modifying a headline for the LovEvolution photographs. How long since I've gone through them, how long did it take me to figure out where they were? Well, not that long, but it's been a while. This sitting about limiting my evaluation of the day based on whether or not I've gotten out for a walk or not, taken a picture or not can't be productive. There are still many things to do here in an apartment that real people (I still live under the perhaps false impression that there are such out there somewhere) do every day with, well, if not enthusiasm then with satisfaction. I know this, I have in my deep dark past done them with satisfaction myself and none of them involved walking.

We've gone this way before without effect.

Remember my list of things to do that I posted last month? Was it more than a month? Picture framing, cataloging images, making prints? Oh, you do. Well, yes, but let's see what happens in another paragraph.

Later still. Walked downtown and sat around the City Center drinking iced coffee for half an hour, took a picture or two, bought ran out of last week iron pills and took the bus back to the apartment. But then the question was what else have I done this day, was it not?

OK, two hours have passed. In continued screwing with my computer to correct a freezing problem I upgraded the BIOS and got an evil “insert boot media” message for my effort. OK, the update process itself wasn't altogether trivial and neither was the step required to fix the “insert boot media” problem, but I got them resolved. The reason I mention this is how can anyone without some background in this stuff get by without putting their local computer shop owner's kid through college? There was a time people had no idea about carburetors, spark plugs and the like when cars were the new thing on the block and maybe that's the way it is with computers. Of course cars have morphed into computers themselves, no more carburetors, and maybe that's the way it is with computers now as ubiquitous and necessary as cars. But I ramble.

Screwing with the computer qualifies as something other than walking. Stretching it? How about laundry? I've been considering doing the laundry. Tomorrow, of course, it's five in the afternoon and I don't do laundry after five in the afternoon unless I'm out of socks. And I'm not out of socks. Until day after tomorrow.

Lame, my son.

Lame it is.