Five in the morning on the clock radio and what the heck: I hadn't had my usual Sunday indoor cycling class and there was a 5:45 Monday version if I chose to arise. Arise and drive it was; the Valley in February was on its way to fulfilling the chamber of commerce role of a pretty and blue day, later warm but now brisk. And with a straw smell in the air reminding me of sunrises on visits to upper California.

Past years eeking friendships in the bay area and certain agendas in the train department as I checked out the immense Roseville yard came to mind.

A few things were returning as the growing light of another school and work week lit this retiree's drive. Not to hawk pro football, but the results of a certain weekend contest you may have heard of made me reflect on The Vicarious; if only the game hadn't started with the "0.49ers".

And a tipsy Dog Pile prior to bed revealed across the bay and over the Oakland hills the obituary for someone I'd known a long time but hadn't contacted in well over a decade, two years ago the day of this post.

The leader of the bike class took to me, if I can call it that, in an interesting way. Maybe next post, pedal and tell?

The ride home featured "old Sol" now just above the horizon, illuminating mortality and change, not to mention "watch the road". Oh, Dan . . .

Thinking of "surface streeting" home but at first took the usual 118 to the 405 option, bailing on an earlier off ramp. I got home to the spectacle of the first of the week's forced marches to various schools on the block---and to watch a Mom with two small children, the little boy kicking my apartment manager's paper, usually taken to her door stoop by me but missed initially with my early rising, down the sidewalk.

He'd stopped as I caught up, and here came one of three chickens from the house there in an airy and seemingly weightless passing. If the agile pullets had been there a while, I've only just discovered them.

The paper was retrieved and delivered; what timing from an interesting morning's journey. We'd wondered where the paper sometimes disappears.

Over pitchy coffee there was an account in my paper of the losing team's dispenser of homophobic remarks being burned on two scorning plays that enabled the team which had the controversial locker room leader, an emblem of buying---and maybe intimidating---one's way out of felony, to triumph.

The crud from past eras, and the preceding week, recedes, however tortuously: while not enough for sensible justice, some things disappear while others are trounced.

But time for one's own changes and revelations, social and personal. Happy February, all.