Still not sure about the lungs. They will become congested and I'll cough, but most of the time they're pretty clear. I don't notice them, at least. About the way they were before I started all the medications. Way better than how I felt inhaling all that stuff, but we'll let it roll along. They'll tell me soon enough if I'm an idiot. I have an annual physical coming up next week and I'll ask my doctor for his advice. “You what!!” You can never tell how they'll react with the exception of sending you their bill the following week.

We are being a bit off handed in our doctors’ remarks, are we not? You do trust them as a group. You go see them often enough.

The disadvantage of the web. Stretch the words a bit for effect and you find you've made statements you wouldn't have otherwise made in a public place. Well, public. Hardly public until one of these things comes back to bite you when you least expect it. Keep aware, my bucko! Be not an idiot! Too often, anyway.

Right.

Right. The day, by the way, is really nice. The sun, the temperature and all the rest of that crap. Fleet Week is still running in San Francisco, but I realize, for some reason, I have no interest whatsoever in attending any of their events. Not sure why. 350.org has a simultaneous series of events scheduled worldwide, as it happens, locally one here in Oakland at Laney College and one up the way in Berkeley. Something about the date 10-10-10, a date on which they've demonstrated for climate action in the past. Which I will also not attend, although I heartily support their effort. Something about a gardening event. Discussions and such. Not sure how I'd photograph a gardening event, discussions and such.

The same way you shoot all your events. No excuses. Rationalizations don't count. Why should photographing them make any difference if you support their cause? Leave the cameras at home.

Leave the cameras at home?

Later. Finishing up some of the Windows 7 installs. The printers now work, somewhat better now perhaps as I was forced to update their drivers and firmware. If you're not into that, you're not into that, but it makes them work without the glitches I've been experiencing under XP. Not that that drivers weren't current under XP. But we're drifting here, I'm the one that's been fighting with his computer, theoretical expert I, once theoretical expert I, retired now for three skill eliminating years, but you get the drift.

Time to get out of here for a while, take a bus downtown (where else?). Maybe Jack London now that it's a weekend, see if people are showing up in a town with seventeen percent unemployment and a reputation for rowdy behavior. As in visitors getting themselves shot in the streets. Not many, you understand, and on the sidewalks, but enough to keep the newspapers in business.

Later still. A bus downtown, a cup of coffee out on the patio at Peet's (where else), two or three pictures experimenting with focus and whether or not to include my denim shrouded knee, deedle-dee-dee, a walk over to the City Center to finish the coffee (actually, to drink about half of a small cup and then throw the rest out, coffee not appealing this morning), a walk then down Broadway to Grand and a bus back to the apartment.

I say walk, but it was an amble, an slow amble, the amble of someone who doesn't really care how long it takes to get wherever he's going. Not tired, at least. That's a killer, tired. Not killer in some sense of discomfort, but more in the sense you're out of the water, nothing to do but catch a nap unless you're tired in a way that doesn't allow sleep. But we've been through that.

A picture or two, I can rationalize the amble as a way to sharpen my senses for possible photographs, but, although I suspect there's some truth to that, it's not the reason I've been walking lately at a turtle's pace. Not sure there's any issues with it, just, you know, ambling, taking it easy.

I sometimes think about why I choose a particular place to eat breakfast or take a cup of coffee. There are other choices in the area for each, but mine, I'm sure, help define my particular personality and habits. Every time I've moved I've had to test various new places for breakfast. Breakfast on the weekends, when I was working; every diddly damned day now that I'm retired.

I have friends, more gregarious, who prefer the café next door to my morning place, and it would be my guess that the more gregarious tend to settle there. There's a wide mix of people who inhabit my café: couples, often mixed, families with small children, a writer or two who sit out in the afternoons scribbling at one of the patio tables (I tried this myself when I was writing in the 70's, found it not to my taste). So, a place for loners of a certain kind?

You get into this kind of analysis and you find it has very little to do with the café in question, but everything to do with your own set of rationalizations and neuroses. And preferences and likes, they're not all negative, but again, more useful for psychoanalysis than a restaurant guide. Won't stop me from doing it now and again.

Where'd that come from?

Where does any of it come from? It came, I wrote.