No training for me for a few days: my back was fine yesterday until I biked home, which, as it turns out, uses your back muscles quite a bit, especially if you're wearing a backpack and a small guitar. (Don't give me that look.) So my back returned to hurting and I trained yesterday anyway, but there's no reason to push through it, so I'll be off the mat until Tuesday or Wednesday.

Instead I'm ripping CDs to play on my Squeezebox, and washing my comforter at the laundromat around the corner. (Washing, sad to say, for the first time in the six years I've had it--I mean, I have two covers for the thing, and I wash those regularly, but it was convenient to never really look into whether the comforter itself was washable. It is, and the thing that finally motivated me was that sleeping with a Chinese sticky plaster on my back overnight left my sheets and comforter smelling like camphor and menthol.

I've started to really spend time and money around my neighborhood, and I'm discovering that I really genuinely love this area. It lacks any sort of pretense to being swanky; it keeps its authentic grit while having mostly clean and well-run services and shops available. There's a Pasta Pomodoro and Starbucks in the chain-store pod down the street; Peet's is finally putting in a store just a few blocks away; there's a really nice little Japanese restaurant directly on the other side of the block; even closer down the street from it is the nice laundromat I went to today. I met the owner while I was there and gave him my compliments: the place has free wireless, which would be more useful to me if it weren't a 45-second walk to my house, but it's still cool.

When I wake up very early in mornings like I did today (5am, usually), I'm always trying to fill the time with something useful, as long as I'm already up. Plus I get bored, and nothing's open that early. Did some laundry, found my Leatherman and put it in its proper storage (in its sheath, in a nylon ditty bag with my headlamp); moved some dirty dishes around; watched TV. Important things, followed by a glorious short nap around 10.

I have an appointment tomorrow afternoon to wander around San Francisco with a girl who, in the end, I really know nothing about, except for a hunch on both sides when I introduced myself.

Maybe I'm going about my life in too reasonable a manner sometimes.