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Here In Oakland

Art & Life


   


Under here.

November 27, 2012

As We Should
Tuesday. To bed by ten having run out of anything on television I wanted to see, up with the alarm easily enough to head off to breakfast and back, they're saying sun after the fog breaks with a high in the mid-sixties, all this in preparation for a rain storm that will dominate through the weekend and deliver a foot of rain in come places starting in the morning. Doesn't look good for Saturday's Oakland Holiday Parade.

Later. Like clockwork: a walk out the door down to the bus stop to head downtown. Another picture of the City Center tree (I'll get it right one of these days) along with another ornament reflection - we're known for carrying a camera, after all, have to show that we use them now and again - and then on to Washington Street to have a cup of coffee inside one of those artsy-fartsy coffee places. (Hup!)

Some deviation from the usual routes, no visits to the ice cream shop in the Asian Cultural Center, a walk then back by the City Hall to have a chicken teriyaki lunch at Gengi in the Rotunda building, the lady behind the counter recognizing me immediately, even though I haven't eaten there in a long while. The camera, of course: “are you still taking pictures?”.

A bus then back home to lie down, close the eyes but not do the usual turn on the radio routine. Nice. No ocular symptoms of any kind, just a little drowsy, up after about an hour to note the arrival of a package from B&H, the last of the cameras I use daily now upgraded from fairly fast 8 gigabyte cards to very fast 16 gigabyte cards.

No reason for this really, replacing two memory cards with larger and faster memory cards, I doubt I'll ever fill even half a 16G card on a shoot, let alone the two in each of the cameras, but you never know and the prices are low enough now it seemed to make sense when I clicked on the web site's Black Friday buy it now button. Now if we can keep it to that for the rest of the year....

Time to start with the guitar. We're doing reasonably well, I think, memorizing the assigned riffs, playing them lately with some level of competence. Until I hear the riffs played on the accompanying CD by the instructor. Oh. Still. Progress. Here in, well, wherever, across the bay from the end of the rainbow.

Evening. Memorize, memorize, we're slowing making progress toward some kind of guitar competence, we are. I've said this before? Am I cheering myself along, priming the pump, pimping the soul, hopelessly howling (in the darkness)? Well, yes. We can do that as well or as badly as anyone, I suspect.

Another Maigret at six, although I'd seen it before, and, true to form, I remembered little of any of it. An hour and a half program where I was vaguely recognizing individual scenes, but really didn't remember by whom or why the deed seems to have been done until the end and then, quite honestly, seeing who the wacko was and the reason why, I suspect I won't bother retaining any of it again.

You like it but you don't like it?

Probably best you don't write these thoughts down as you then have to do some actual thinking to make sense of why you're talking about watching it. It does come together in a particular odd sort of off the wall way, both good and bad from my particular taste, and I do like the tone, the setting, the acting, the way its put together, albeit with a wandering and infinitely forgettable story line. And we're talking about having seen it in the last six months (I think - at least within the last year), so I'm consistent. Admittedly consistent.

Two of the four public television stations have been fund raising running old Doo Wop programs during the evenings in these last couple of weeks, so nothing is on I'm willing watch, even if I do have all of the old records from the period, so to bed early. As we should.

The photo up top was taken of the City Center Christmas tree yesterday with a Nikon D4 mounted with a 24-70mm f 2.8 G Nikkor lens.


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