So, bright eyed, clear headed, the world back in oyster mode, where has all the crap I've been complaining about gone? We shall not probe, we shall not ask embarrassing questions, we'll just, you know, pretend it was all a dream and assume the way it is today (at least right now) is the way it will be in the future. Oh, and, just in case, take some pictures while we're able.

Later. A walk out the apartment door to realize, when I checked my pocket, I'd left the front door keys at their usual place on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. A simple little break in my “put on the street shoes, get the wallet, get the change and keys” routine/rut to forgot the keys. Ah, well. The apartment manager will be home when I return from my haircut was my thought. Right? Please?

A bus to the ATM on Broadway - we had the wallet, just not the change and the keys - and then a walk on to the City Center to pick up a cup of coffee next door to the hair salon before entering to be shorn. Sheared. Trimmed. Like the result, if I had any ambition I'd take a self portrait and post it.

Missed a returning bus by two minutes, so a ride on the free Broadway bus to Grand and then a walk back home, picking up a small box of Good & Plenty at the 7-11 look-alike. I guess I do like licorice, although I'm not sure it didn't throw the head off slightly for about twenty minutes after I'd eaten them. All in one go. Of course. Easily finished the box before I reached the apartment. Why I don't buy candy in large packages.

Halloween tomorrow evening? No candy for the kids? The little ones? Being a bad old man this year again?

No kids in the building other than newborns, two of them right now, both under one year old. We're safe from the trick or treaters and safe from having any large quantities of leftover candy sitting on a kitchen counter in the morning. I've actually, in the past, thrown the stuff out when kids didn't come by trick or treating and one certainly does not want to do that, right? Throw food in the trash? Candy qualifies as food, right? Certainly in Oakland.

It's noon. Maybe time for lunch. The sun is out and it's a little warmer, although clearly the coming winter is starting to show. Winter in California really isn't winter (at least along the coast), but we've all forgotten what real winters are like here and we complain with the best of them when the temperatures sink below about fifty or fifty-five. You would too.

And those keys you left in the apartment?

Ah. I told you I'm forgetful, evidently even between paragraphs. The apartment manager was in, answered the buzzer and it all turned out swell here in Dingle-Dell.

Later still. A walk over to the lake thinking I could probably do that lunch. No desire to go downtown, we'd already been downtown, so on to the morning café (where else). There was a large group of kids in the middle of some kind of fertility rite as I was crossing Grand and so I took a picture from a distance. No need to get closer. Something to do with Halloween I suspect, although I've always thought fertility rites were more associated with rebirth and held in the spring.

Lunch was ice cream and coffee. Not really hungry, no need to add a sandwich. The sky is clear and there's sun, a little warmer than it was yesterday, so it was fine sitting outside at a table in a light sweater and jacket.

A walk back home, stopping to sit on a bench by the lake. A picture or two for no particular reason, although I like this one more than I'd originally thought. More birds out there, I need to take that long lens with me more often to see their faces.

Evening. Another repeat of two episodes at six of a series recently run (so even I remember the outcomes), but there's a World Series game to take its place. No complaints. I'm rooting for Boston.

No real reason other than I know the history of the Boston team better than I know Saint Louis (to the point of writing Saint Lewis before seeing the obvious). I seem to recall one of the first if not the first major league game I ever attended was between the Yankees and Boston, so maybe that's why. Ted Williams was playing for Boston.

I've gotten in some time on the guitar, but not nearly enough, so we'll keep plugging. I hope we keep plugging. Chugging.