I did have that flask of sake last night, but found it put my head in a funky place I didn't like and so I skipped out on drinking the second, it now sitting up on the refrigerator in the kitchen. Now, if I could keep it to that - one, now and again, for old times sake (ouch!) - life would be even more swell than it already is, here across the Bay from the city that sits at the end of the rainbow.

My morning waitress asked me what I did all day, now that I was retired? I mentioned I had some web sites I worked on, came here to have breakfast in the mornings, that pretty much took care of my mornings, but the afternoons were still up in the air. A picture or two, OK, my daily walk, but after a year of retirement I still had the afternoons to work out. Interesting, she thought, and to retire so early too. So early? I am sixty-five. What! You look like you're in your early fifties! My, my. I think my outrageous tipping is paying off. I may look like I'm still in my fifties, young lady, but half the time I feel like I'm ninety-five.

Later. A bus ride downtown and then a walk farther down to Jack London Square after debating (for a good half hour) here at the apartment where I might like to go today to get in my walk and maybe take a couple of pictures. The palm trees are still there, they weren't an hallucination from my last trip when I first noticed them, a walk back and then a bus ride past my apartment to my morning cafè for lunch. A long enough walk to make up for yesterday's not long enough walk to the post office.

One or two bits of knowledge this morning. The trouble I've been having with the Nikon D3 seems, in fact, to be trouble with a specific battery. Fine. I don't need to send the camera in to be repaired, just replace the bad battery. Good. The second bit was the fact I've run out of my backup stack of journal photographs and I'm going to have to generate photographs on a daily basis if I'm going to post them here. So this afternoon I fitted the D3 with a 35mm lens that forces me to look at the world from a different perspective and set forth to see if I could get people upset.

With the 35mm you can sort of take pictures as if you weren't. It's a wide angle lens, not all that wide angle, but you can take pictures with it by pointing the camera, say, at the belt buckle level toward a subject and get still get something in the frame. Sounds sleazy, doesn't it? We'll see if I'm willing to follow through. I tried this many years ago when I was shooting film specifically with this idea in mind with mixed results, but I was less of an asshole then, I'm a bigger asshole now.

You're an old foof without a clue.

But with a camera and a 35mm lens.