The gas price sign was displaying properly when I went in for breakfast, but was blank as shown when I left, so a picture to document both the sign and the price. They do this fairly often (the price displayed - $4.359 - when I entered the café is the same price that was reflected on the pump when I left to cross the street to take the photos and check) and I have no idea why. Odd that this little the price of gas conceit would last this long and take up so much time.

Speaking of which - lasted this long - tomorrow marks the beginning of the fifteenth year since I started this journal. Talk about small conceits that have lasted too so long. I first started earlier in January, 1998, a “what in the hell is this about?” experiment with the web, although the first day I posted a “journal” entry, calling it a journal (having stumbled across others by then), was on October 29th. My, my.

One day I'll go back and clean up the formatting of the old entries, one day (hopefully far) in the future. Something to do when I can no longer hobble outdoors looking for pictures.

Later. OK, I am definitely tired, but tired in a good way after a run down to Fruitvale and photographing the Dia de los Muertos Street Festival this early afternoon. Hey. Well over an hour plus shooting, taking many more pictures of the exhibits and skeleton figures, faces, paintings and dolls, than the (in this case painted) faces of people bobbing in the crowd. Of course there weren't all that many painted faces bobbing in the crowd, but that's no excuse for a street photographer who says he's into candid portraits.

Still, again, a good day for pictures. The festival is held right off the Fruitvale BART station entrance, it's an easy ride down, an easy ride back, made all the easier this afternoon as I caught the connections between the various buses and trains within no more than two minutes of entering and exiting the stations. A sign the Fates were with us? Why not? It happens. Did today.

I took twenty minutes to download the pictures from the cameras before walking out again down the hill to catch a bus to the morning café for lunch - a chicken salad sandwich, strawberry ice cream and lemonade - before walking back to the apartment. Tired, but at the same time buzzed. Now to bury ourself in the photographs, the danger for the rest of the day being I don't spend enough time with the guitar. (hup!)

Evening. Well, we've spent the last four hours working on the photographs and creating the web pages. We'll create the little thumbnail images tomorrow, but they'll be posted in the morning, probably before noon. There are three sections of twenty-one with some ten or so additional pictures I've put between the small visible section thumbnails. I was surprised, thinking I'd have to be lucky to come up with two. You never know. I never know.

Listened to the baseball game, watched the six o'clock Italian police procedural ( switching back and forth with the game - you can tell my level of baseball absorption, but no apologies, no complaints) while playing along on the guitar, but only sometimes on the guitar. We are behind on our guitar. We are going to catch up over the next three days, though, yes we are. (hup!)

So I'm happy with the results. The time I've been spending with the photographs, the amount of time day in and day out, has been showing me new aspects of what it is that I like to shoot, how to better pursue them as well as things I need to learn in making some next steps. Which I guess is good. Makes you wonder where this might have gone had I kept with the photography when I was much younger and had the energy to push it further up the steps.