Then again, Friday, a third day of squirting Flonase into the nose, the cough getting better, the chest congestion going through changes. Changes brought on by this Flonase stuff? Let's assume they have, even though there's no way to know. Just be happy, home now from breakfast at the usual place (the papers read), it appears to be in some sort of resolution. Nice that anything gets resolved anymore, this first decade of another century.

I did run a 17 x 22 inch print Wednesday when a package of Epson 17 x 22 paper arrived. For some reason I've been thinking 13 x 19 was the largest print this printer could make and I've made a bunch of them. Not so. Ho, ho. Let me tell you, 17 x 22, four times the size of an 8 x 10, is large. Larger than I might ever want to frame for example, having then to find space to put it up on one of my book case covered walls, so I just taped it to a book case (handy things for displaying prints) in the living room for ambience and instruction and such. My old Photographing People instructor at SF State recommended we put our work up on our walls so we could see and think about them like good little photographers and that's always made sense. Sometimes it takes time for sense to sink in. Here in Oakland.

I'm out of photographs. I've mentioned that. Get thee to a festival, sir. Get thee outside with a camera. Think. See. Don't sit there staring at your computer writing about your cough, your muddy thoughts, your absolute inability to buy a plane ticket to somewhere interesting. Travel is hardly the end all, be all of existence, yet I write interminably about traveling “real soon now” with no result. I am beginning to think this isn't good, that I'm in a rut, I've lost my marbles. Am losing my marbles and I'll never see any of those promised dancing in the moonlight photographs of Hawaiian babes and Brazilian babes and large, digitally altered landscapes!

Now you're stealing my shtick!

Later. Sitting in the Oakland City Center out at a table drinking coffee and eating a cranberry muffin with the camera on my lap, watching, looking in the less sinister sense. The sinuses damp, the still cool air feeling pretty good flowing over them, the head clear. I guess. This going back and forth between the lungs-cough and the sinus-head tends to blur over time, but the bus ride down and the walk back along Broadway was invigorating and, all in all, I've been feeling as if I've turned a corner and I can off this bitching kick. I'm ready. I am ready.

Got back to the apartment and learned it was the 35mm lens that had caused the over-exposure problem when shooting with the D2H the other day, as the pictures taken today on the D2Xs had the same problem. My, my. Still, better than a camera body going south. The 35mm f 2.0 is a lens I like, so it's going later this afternoon to Nikon for repair. Yes I cleaned the contacts and whatnot, but something other than electrical contact is the problem. So there. A lens needing repair. At least it wasn't because I dropped it.

It's noon, half the day done, although I seem to have accomplished more than I'd think was necessary for a Friday. Still, sitting around here watching news programs doesn't sound the best of plans. I've read way too much news this morning, this week, this life. Maybe put that on hold for a day, a week, a life. Or am I just drifting, here, repeating myself?

Later still. I packed the lens and dropped it off at the local UPS shop three blocks down on Grand. Walking back I was thinking that seems to be about it. A nap now might be nice. A quick blood pressure test when I got home thinking it would be as high as it was going to get just after a walk ending with a trudge up a hill. One twenty over seventy-five. Maybe halve this blood pressure medicine again, forty milligrams cut to twenty. Call the cardiologist's nurse, see what they think. Keep pushing. Get this stuff fixed. And if it can't be fixed, well then come to grips, plan a nice sunset on a beach somewhere drinking umbrella drinks, thinking umbrella thoughts, dreaming umbrella dreams. And stop the carping.

And the cameras?

Nikon, I'm sure, makes a beach ready umbrella camera with matching umbrella lens.