Saturday. Overcast, the morning, a reasonable night's sleep, but maybe a nap later at some point to finish it off. Breakfast at the usual place, I was able to eat about half of what was on the plate. Too much of the usual stuff. I've heard of a couple of things going on I might photograph later, but I'll have to track them down.

There's much that falls through the cracks in the way of street festivals in the Bay Area and neither the Chronicle nor the Tribune are good at keeping any kind of track of other than the bigger ones. They both have events sections, but for street fairs and the like, even fairly large local street fairs, they often don't list them until the last minute or list them with so much other stuff (poetry reading at libraries and the like) you can't find them without searching. There are other sources for information on weekend doings and I usually check them out.

Two small paragraphs so far and there have been at least three gross to subtle typos that I've caught. They're different than the typos of say ten years ago, there's some glitch in the communication from the brain to the fingers that will transpose letters, yes, but also come up with different words. Close, but different in meaning and context. This is a change I hope doesn't accelerate. Quite manageable now, but you hear stories. There are so many stories of where this life can go after a certain point and we have entered that certain point. Many possible forks in the road.

A couple of hours later now in mid-morning, the sun breaking through the overcast. The lungs are causing some coughing as they digest the various inhalers I've inflicted on them. My three day experiment in going off the medications seems to have kicked them up. There were perhaps two days of quiet before they came back and now there will be a few days, I assume, for the meds can take hold again. The problem is with the meds themselves. Some of them do have ocular effects. The really bad one has been replaced by a better one and the double vision has disappeared, but one or two of the others can cause short term visual distortions of their own, reminding me of my hopefully now gone ocular migraines, and that's no fun.

There is a Yerba Buena Neighborhood Fair over in San Francisco this afternoon, one I'd read about earlier this week, and I think I'll attend. An easy BART ride to the Montgomery Street station, an opportunity to test my new Clipper Card. I see a “pending” one dollar charge against the card online at the bank, so I assume it's active and the one dollar pending will become twenty dollars once it's been used. As an old techie I'm still interested in how they design these things, harbingers of the future. Interesting future if you can keep up.

As an aside I bought the new Carlos Santana album on a whim (Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time). I bought and listened to his first l.p.'s when they were released in the early seventies, of course, great stuff, but haven't followed his music particularly closely since. All the songs are done with other well known performers, covers of a dozen really great guitar pieces, some of which I like, many of which leave me less than interested. They're extremely good, no complaints there, but a number of the cuts are worth listening to (for my particular current tastes) and some simply aren't. I'm sure others will hear them differently.

Except for While My Guitar Gently Weeps, the great George Harrison and Eric Clapton classic. Santana approaches it in a unique manner, not at all the treatment given it by Harrison and Clapton, but Santana's work out on this piece (along with India Arie & Yo-Yo Ma, oddly enough) is really first class, a more than worthy treatment that can stand with the original(s). So, if you're a While My Guitar freak as, I'm afraid, am I, go get it. No reason to get the entire album, but get at least the one song. Nice. Very nice. And again, totally different in approach and style (albeit really wicked guitar). Hup! Hup!

Later. This is evidently the first of these particular Yerba Buena Fairs from what they were saying, and there wasn't much happening. I was last there at the Pistahan Festival and it was packed, really packed. This one not so. This one, perhaps, just getting its feet wet. So a walk a couple of times around the area, one or two pictures, not bothering to unpack the long lens camera from the backpack, a walk then back to BART and Oakland.

There was a beer street festival being held on Washington near Pacific Coast Brewery, an old haunt when I worked at APL, so I checked it out. A band playing, young guys loud and raucous (no complaints), a not particularly large crowd (this was at one in the afternoon), a line of various beers on tap in a booth and that was about it. More pictures, a wander over toward Broadway to photograph one or two of the old classic restored cars on display, a walk then over to the City Center for a bagel with cream cheese and an orange juice, home now just after two.

Later still. A walk down the street to have sushi with sake finished with a piece of ice cold green tea cheesecake. Nice small portions, a nice small high, a picture of the sushi chef when we got to talking about photography as he admitted he'd been a photographer when a college student. Used a Nikon F3 with a motorized drive. I mentioned I still had mine. No drive, but still the camera and two very nice manual lenses. Haven't used it in years.

A good day, a nap after returning from the city, an early turn in this evening if I'm smart. The lungs are still sore, but the sinus-upper palate thing feels good. Should after a large flask of hot sake, I'm thinkin’.