Apologies for not posting yesterday. The day went in a direction I hadn’t planned.

This week I’ve been taking what’s now known as a stay-cation, loafing some and pottering with things I’ve been putting off handling. Yesterday I’d planned on going to dinner with a friend I see periodically, and somehow that restaurant date turned into a reunion with other old friends, and then an evening at the home of one of those old friend’s relatives, up in the trackless wastes of the far northern suburbs. We spent the hours talking about old times, some of which I’d shared in, and it was pretty late by the time I got home.

Today I went to the post office to get my picture taken so I could send in my passport renewal form. I wanted to do it at mid-morning so I wouldn’t be slowing down a long line of customers. The clerk who helped me was the nice-looking lady there I’ve long admired, which may explain a certain wistful look in my eyes in the picture (I think I’m the only person in the world who generally likes his passport photos).

Then I found out the renewal fee. When in the name of all that’s wholly unreasonable did the price of renewing a passport get to be $110.00? Plus the cost of the photo and certification of the letter? I’d write to my congressman if he weren’t Keith Ellison.

Then in the afternoon I gave blood. This was at my favorite hemorrhaging venue, the VFW in Golden Valley, where they serve you sloppy joes as a reward for your suffering. I got the pretty technician, which should have put me on alert from the start. Pretty women almost always end up hurting me, and this one didn’t break form. She finally had to get another tech to find the right place to puncture my vein. In fairness to them, I’ve given a lot of blood and there’s a great deal of scar tissue inside my left elbow. Nobody’s ever been able to get anything out of the right arm.

And then home. Some reading, and then I worked a little more on revising the last completed novel I’ve got in storage, which may or may not come out as an e-book after a while, depending on how diligent I am. I’m worried about one character – someone I don’t like, and who was intended as a caricature of a kind of person we all know. I don’t like plain caricature in other people’s novels, and I need to get past it in my own. I’ve got to find something admirable or sympathetic in this person. I’m working on it.