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Under here.

September 20, 2011

Doing All Right

Tuesday. Awake with the alarm turning on the radio to lie there just a little bit longer as the world came into focus. Up then, noticing a little bit longer had dragged on for forty-five minutes. My, my. I'd gotten to bed and to sleep at a decent hour, feel pretty good, but I suspect there's a nap in the near future. The sky is clear, the sun doing it's thing, they're saying in the higher seventies today instead of the low nineties we're had in the last two days, but it feels, well, overly warm for eight-thirty in the morning. We'll persevere.

One day left of practice before my lesson tomorrow morning. I've been putting in the time, running through the lesson, but somehow don't feel as if I've accomplished anything. The one new riff is down, I've gone over the earlier one's to keep them tight, but the barre chord changes are still terrible. Well, funky, clunky, inept. We should maintain some form of accuracy here no matter the temptation and the lack of an editor.

Later. No doubt about the temperature. A walk down to the usual place to have an iced tea and some kind of a cookie, stopping at Walden Pond to check out the photography books. There was a Man Ray collection I looked through that included photographs I don't believe I've seen before and thought about picking it up as I was passing the store on the way home but managed to avoid. Not all that expensive, but what do I need with another photography book, I already have as many Man Ray collections as a sensible person should. (I'm a piker compared to some who fill wall after wall in room after room, but we're talking a broader cross section here of the book driven, but a lesser driven sort.)

Right, the temperature, the nineties. It's t-shirt only and then only with a breeze of which there is little. I've had my outing unless I decide to go out later. So fine, we have a guitar to abuse, a journal to enter, maybe some sake later after a run to the supermarket. Sake is nice on a cooler evening, less nice when it's warm and a sun heated head is introduced to alcohol. We do have our rules and sometimes we follow them. Older and wiser.

Otherwise what? Ms. R wrote on Facebook that her parents, siblings and their families had been at the Reno air show tragedy, but were fortunately unharmed. Still. Not the way to lose one's family, not that there's a good way. If I were smarter and wiser (as opposed to older and wiser) I'd do more here to prepare for the earthquake. For someone who reads the news and is familiar with the long list of recent earthquakes, storms, floods, famines and nuclear meltdowns I'm singularly unprepared.

You were smart enough not to buy another book this morning to put up on a shelf in one of those unanchored cases that line your walls. Once less piece of flying debris. You've probably saved your life.

Hmm. Good point.

Later still. One o'clock, overly warm here in the apartment, need to sit in front of the fan. I do.

Even later still. Restrung the guitar. Not sure I could hear the difference, maybe a little brighter, but I suspect changing them every month is often enough, no reason to do it every two weeks. OK, knowledge gained, move forward.

With the temperature outside I've gotten in more than enough practice. Good. Ready for tomorrow. I don't know if I've made much progress, but progress of some kind must have been made, so we'll not worry about it. Relax, do the stuff, then relax, put your feet up. Any trepidation about an upcoming lesson comes from my experience with the piano and the clarinet when I was in grade school and younger. I wasn't the best of students. Not terrible, but not the best and I finally after many lessons bailed. That was then, this is now.

Sushi and sake this evening, I think. I have a UPS delivery due and it often comes after five, sometimes after six, so if I wait and it's late, the sushi place will be full. No room at the bar, no room at a table. Such tension and excitement this late in a day. Who could have thought?

Evening. A walk down the way in the heat to have sushi and sake, being sure to leave a note on the mailbox asking UPS to contact the building manager if they arrived while I was gone, back to find the package sitting in front of my front door. That's good. The bad is I'd ordered the wrong device. Well, wrong in the sense it didn't fit the hard drive I was thinking of adding to it, but right in the sense I can always use another hard drive enclosure as I have, well, many hard drives. You can't have been a techie without accumulating stuff. Lots of stuff. It will be put to work.

We'll now go into the evening futzing with the guitar while watching my evening Korean soap (of the non historical sort). We are hopeless, but we are doing all right.

The photograph was taken at the Albany Solano Stroll Sunday with a Nikon D3s mounted with a 70-200mm f 2.8 Nikkor VR II lens using a 1.4x teleconverter.


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