Friday. A decent night's sleep after more reading last night, up this (sunny) morning feeling much better, to breakfast and back now at eight. I noted the gas prices as I was leaving (what had they been the morning before?) and realized when I got home they'd dropped the eight cents they'd increased this last week. Go figure. Why had I not remembered yesterday's prices and why had they suddenly dropped? I have an answer I don't like for why I'd not remembered; the oil companies, well perhaps there's a set of answers for them as well. Hi-dee-ho, on through another Friday we go, but feeling better for staying home yesterday instead of running about.

The Occupy Wall Street people are planning a demonstration later at four this afternoon, planning to march about the downtown area, and I'll make it a point to photograph it. Which means I'm otherwise clear for the day. A walk back to the café to photograph that change in gasoline prices (I have pictures from earlier this month, but we'll go back for a fresh set), some guitar practice and maybe a nap. The building excitement on a Friday before a weekend! Life is good. It is. Really. No complaints.

Stop.

Later. OK, a walk down along the lake with the 24-120mm lens in tow finding, of course, a Pelican and four Black-Crested Night Heron's, but within reasonable shooting distance. Better to have had the 200mm (270mm equivalent on the smaller sensor camera), but I was after a photograph of the gas station sign and a long lens would have made the shooting more difficult. Or something like that. We have these little talks with ourself as we're setting out.

Still, early enough for the light to be a little different. The first shot more to record the sun, the sky and the color, not as something to put up on a wall, although my ideas keep changing on that. A shot of a wall embellishment that's part of a building renovation they've been doing along Grand near the morning restaurant. I wonder what's going in there? The spaces in the old store were interesting and now they're making major (and not inexpensive) changes for a new tenant. I wonder what or who may be coming? Whatever it is won't be as faceless as the usual storefront along this stretch. But who knows? I suspect it's not a dry cleaning establishment.

I was reading a piece in the paper this morning saying a large exercise study has confirmed just a bit of walking every day will add greatly to longevity and decrease markedly some of the usual health problems now so epidemic. I walk quite a bit more than fifteen minutes every day, more for the pictures than anything else.

But I was thinking this morning, as I started out to get that picture, that I no longer thought of walking a mile or so to run an errand as anything more than just that, an errand, something that needed to be done, no thought of the walking that would be involved, that it would be anything particularly noteworthy or onerous. Which is good according to the article in the paper.

Even better in that it suggests I don't have to think at all of starting a program of pushups or weight training to keep the head and body from coming apart. I really don't like pushups. I really don't like deep knee bends with a hundred or whatever pounds up on my shoulders. As you may have guessed. This was a problem when I was a young Infantry officer in the late sixties. Got to keep up with your men, you know, lest they write you off. In a war “writing you off” is no small matter to contemplate.

Later still. I set out for the downtown at two, shot some pictures of the Occupy encampment (it continues to grow and now covers pretty much all of the lawn area in Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of City Hall) walking the circumference a couple of times, then headed over to the City Center where I had a late lunch sitting out at a table in front of the Fountain Café.

I'd read where they planned to “demonstrate in the downtown area” between four and five, something I wasn't altogether sure I wanted to shoot (at my age I'm not really looking for action shots). I knew setting out early as I had would result in my having shot for two hours or more by the time four rolled around and I'd probably want to flake out. Which I did. Flake out. After a cup of coffee and a raspberry shortcake cookie in the Rotunda building, of course. We are not savages here after all.

So I got a bunch of photographs which I've been working on in Photoshop for these last two and a half hours. Two more sections for artandlife. Good. I'll finish them up tomorrow in time to head out and shoot that many more, something about the MoveOn.org group assembling and then marching from Laney College to the City Hall in the afternoon to join the Occupy Wall Street group. Sounds reasonably safe and comfortable for an old coot to shoot, although I have no doubt it will wear me out.

You actually have been pretty busy.

I have. I may need a vacation starting about next week.