Oh, and the enthusiasm expressed for a glass or two of sake last night was just that: enthusiasm. A stone cold sober evening throughout. We have our little successes, we have our little failures.

To breakfast (where else), home now just after eight, the AT&T installer due between nine and noon. A good day to be sitting here waiting as opposed to being out on my mid morning walk. I banged my right shin, just above the ankle, on something while rearranging the apartment day before last. One of those ouch! at the time bangs that then go away, but come back later to linger on like some evil leech until it peters out. Days later. At least I did it getting something productive done and didn't do it screwing around sitting in a chair watching television. A war wound instead of some weird ding picked up during the daily debauchery. But I do go on about my aches and pains. Interesting to me, at least. Wide eyed, here in Oakland.

Still, going back and reading this stuff, you do seem stuck in an “ouch!” rut these last several years with all your quotidian little problems.

A man with a clean apartment is a man with the bit in his teeth who's pursuing solutions, not problems.

Perhaps, given your rejoinder, professional help might be in order. Something your health insurance, I believe, still covers?

Later. The AT&T guy arrived around eleven, going downstairs to the utilities room to futz with this and that, up here to the apartment to install a much more high tech looking modem than the last. He hadn't been aware I was getting a setup with five static IP addresses and not the usual assigned by the system ( DHCP) package, so he had to call in to his headquarters to straighten this out. I was thinking, after all this mess with AT&T, they were going to tell me the five IP address package wasn't available through this new U-verse thing, but it turned out it was, although it took him almost an hour sitting in his truck waiting on their call to straighten it out.

OK, they're a different set of five addresses than the ones I'd had, but this I expected. The problem, after he called in to phone central again to have my “port activated”, was that it didn't work. OK, the installer was now gone, but a call to tech support lasting two hours, most of it with me sitting on hold, straightened it out. I discovered (finally) the IP addresses the installer had been given weren't right, a bad gateway address being the main culprit (I asked the installer and two levels of support “is this gateway address correct?”, knowing it was necessary to make it or any other connection of this kind fly), but we finally figured it out. Six hours to get a DSL connection up and running here in Oakland. My, my.

Actually, I was cool. No, really. I knew, no matter how long it took, the thing was going to work. By the end of the day it was going to work. I have a wireless router that needs to have its IP address changed and I'm not sure I remember how to get into it again to do the deed, but there's a manual around here somewhere (or sitting on the web). I was able to change the network hard drive and the big printer addresses, the two more critical components, so they and I are up and running.

It's been a long day, the sinuses and the upper palate haven't been behaving and maybe, all things considered, this day was not meant to be anything but what it was, best to have it all happen simultaneously: sinuses, palate and DSL; just sit here and watch. So I was cool. Didn't even think upset. Courteous. It was humorous, actually. Actually.

So, the day done, the week is done, a weekend ahead. I have a hunch this funky stuff will evaporate come tomorrow in time for JPop and the August Moon Festival in San Francisco. Pictures are coming. I can feel it in the air. And in the sinuses.