Today’s burning question:
Do I put the five small bags of assorted candies into the wire basket where our snacks are stored, knowing the husband is going to roll his eyes and have things to say about them, or do I hide them and keep them all to myself, because anyone who would complain about candy deserves no candy?
I have bought a new camera. Okay, it’s not new. It’s actually quite old. I bought a new old camera. It’s an Asahi Pentax K1000, which was likely manufactured in 1981 or 1982. So it’s exactly the same camera I used when I was on the school newspaper staff in high school and college. Yes, I have decided I’m done with digital and will be returning to film. It feels a little crazy, but I’ve been having very strong feelings about digital vs. analog everything, and I’m coming down firmly on the side of all things analog are better.
Anyway, here it is! Isn’t it lovely?
It’s not an easy thing to shoot with film anymore. Just finding a place to develop film and do it well is a struggle, and heaven help you if you’d like them to make prints from the actual negatives instead of printing from digital scans of the negatives. It is my intention to eventually develop my own film at home, and I would like at some point to also have access to a darkroom to make my own prints. But for now, I just want to remember all the things I have forgotten about shooting photographs with a film camera. It’s a little scary, but it’s important for me to do things that feel scary. Things that feel hard. Things that move me out of my comfort zone.
The camera arrived on Monday, and I spent hours that day inspecting it, cleaning it, and familiarizing myself with its minimal functions. I’d planned to take it downtown on Tuesday to snap some photos, but the day started dark and when the sun finally came out, it arrived with a whole lot of wind. Like ridiculous levels of wind. If it’s that windy at my house, downtown would be a nightmare, so I worked on other projects, chased down outdoor things as they blew away, and grumbled quietly about my plans being ruined.
Today it looks like it’ll be gloomy and moist, but at least not windy, so I’m going to shamble around outdoors a bit and hopefully find something interesting to photograph. This first film is ready just a light leak test and to make sure the camera actually functions as a camera, but I might as well try to get good pics, or at least do the best my rusty skills will allow. I am not expecting greatness, but you know I’m always hoping for it.
And if the weather turns too foul for being outside, I’ll just work on the camera related projects I started on yesterday … going through my fabric stash to find materials for a camera bag, strap, and changing bag. To go along with my negative feelings about digital things, mass produced things also make me cranky. I’m simply not paying as much as they want for things I can clearly see are low quality and will need to be replaced regularly. If I make the things I need, I have only myself to blame if they suck.
Anyway, it’d been a while since I posted on the blog, and I thought maybe I should mention this thing that’s been taking up a good chunk of my free time lately (and into the future). I’d say I promise to post over here more often, but we all know I’d be lying. I post when I feel like it, and I guess I don’t feel like it all that often anymore. I’m okay with that.
This morning someone said something on the fediverse, and I responded, and my response in that moment caused me to have some thoughts. Naturally, I feel compelled to share them with you.
First, the thing I said that got me thinking…
Sometimes, someone unwittingly pushes a button you don’t know you have, and sometimes, you are well aware that button exists, but you’ve been ignoring it. I’ve been ignoring my feelings on the ephemeral nature of digital data for quite a while now, but I’ve always known that in the future, the lack of analog sources of information could (and likely will) be devastating to the study of our current time and place in history. I’m a big fan of hard copy. Things written or printed on paper have the potential to survive even the most damaging of disasters. Digital data struggles to survive on your desk in a temperature controlled house. If you want it to exist throughout the entirety of your own lifespan, you must maintain it. Coddle it. Tend to it like it’s a living thing. A photograph or a handwritten journal can sit in an attic long enough for everyone to forget it exists, and when it is rediscovered, it can be seen, read, enjoyed, learned from.
At this point, those of you who don’t know me well may be thinking I am some sort of Luddite opposed to all things digital. Untrue! I love this digital age we live in! I love computers! I love the things I can do with my iPad. I’m thrilled I can take a thousand photos to get one that’s perfect, and all it costs me is a bit of electricity to recharge a battery. It is amazing and delightful that I can communicate with the people I know near instantaneously, no matter where they are on the planet, and it brings me great joy that I can babble at length here on my blog, and once I hit “post” anyone who cares to can read it. Our digital age is wondrous, but I do worry for how humans in the far off future will learn of our time, what might survive, and if what survives (if anything) will give them an accurate picture of who the people of the 21st century were, what we believed, how we lived, and what felt important to us.
So as I’ve been shambling about the house doing all the usual morning tasks, making coffee, feeding cats, and seeing the husband off to work, there have been all these discordant thoughts and feelings bouncing off each other in my brain. That’s what my brain does when it senses a problem needing a solution or two opposing ideas that need resolution, and it can churn away at it in the background for days (sometimes even weeks) before a finished thought pops into my conscious mind. Today, it took an hour…
Don’t do an email newsletter, bring back the hard copy zine. Create something that has a chance to survive, which might outlive you.
Be the change you want to see.
A few months ago, I promised everyone a monthly email newsletter, and I have tried to make that a reality, but because I refuse to have any tracking going on within said newsletter, that cut me off from the services that make newsletter making/sending painless and easy. As I tried to spin up ways to do it all myself, I realized I wasn’t enjoying any of it. I didn’t want to do an email newsletter, but I promised people I would, so I felt like I had to do it. This only made me hate the idea even more, and so last month I (somewhat intentionally) “forgot” to keep working on it.
But oh … how I loved making zines (and receiving them), and since the day I stopped producing mine, so many years ago now, I’ve often thought of doing a hard copy zine again. I enjoyed the entire process of deciding what to do each month, what to include, how it should look, and taking the time to draw things, hand letter things, and physically cutting and pasting it all together. Printing copies on the library’s Xerox or having it printed, and then mailing it out to people who wanted to receive it and sometimes receiving their own zine in return! No pain, no struggle, no frustration. Just joyful work.
So I’m going to take the advice my brain spit out this morning. I will not be doing an email newsletter. I’m going to do a zine, and not one created digitally and then printed out (an email newsletter without the email). Nope, I’m going 100% old school. Doing it the way I did in the past, the way I enjoyed doing it. How will the people who were expecting an email newsletter react to this news? Don’t know. Don’t especially care. I can’t keep doing things just because others expect or want me to do them. I gotta do what I want to do, and what I have wanted to do for quite some time now is breath new life into my not at all forgotten zine.
Him: Do you have the oven on?
Her: No. What I’m smelling right now is lighter fluid. Like someone is firing up a BBQ.
Him: Yes, lighter fluid! Why do I smell it in the house?
Her: Kitchen window is open. I’ll investigate.
So I did investigate. First I stuck my nose up to the kitchen window. The lighter fluid smell was coming from outside, but no neighbors were outside. I didn’t hear the sounds of anyone having a BBQ. All the yards were dark. To get a better bead on where the smell might be coming from, I stepped out onto the front stoop.
The smell of butane slapped me in the face so hard it made my eyes water. There was no telling what direction the scent was wafting from, because it was everywhere.
Other people likely would have called neighbors, the gas company, or maybe 911. I shrugged my shoulders, went back inside, closed the kitchen window, reported to the husband it smelled like someone had crop dusted our street with lighter fluid, and went back to making dinner. If I’m going to die in a fiery conflagration, I’d prefer to do it on a full stomach. Wouldn’t want to arrive in any possible afterlife with low blood sugar and a grumbling tummy.
By the time we sat down to eat a few minutes later, the smell had dissipated, at least inside our house, so I forgot all about it. We ate, watched an episode of Star Trek Prodigy, I did a little reading, and then off to bed I went. With not a care in the world and my stomach pleasantly filled with feta and basil ravioli, I immediately fell into a deep slumber.
This is probably where you’re thinking we were rudely awakened in the middle of the night by some terrifying catastrophe, but no, we were not. I slept for for four hours, awakened at 2 am as I do these days, and bounced off to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. While I was waiting for the water to boil, light coming from the neighbor’s workshop caught my eye. I hadn’t noticed whether or not they were on during the nasty smell event during my dinner making, but why would I? It’s as normal for those lights to be on at all hours of the night as it is for the stars to be in the sky.
The fact our neighbor is in his workshop tonight, doing whatever it is he does back there, does provide a possible answer to why the air was thick with the smell of lighter fluid. I’ve only been in his workshop once. It was a tool-filled place which also contained a gas welding rig and a variety of other tanks/containers holding an assortment of gases/liquids that required warning stickers. Unless further evidence presents itself, or I hear anything on the grapevine, I’m just going to assume he had some sort of incident in the workshop involving butane or kerosene.
If I bump into him on trash day, maybe I politely ask if they noticed any strange smell on Saturday night. More likely, now that I’ve written it all down, I will forget all about the night the air smelled of lighter fluid. Unless it happens again. Once is weird. Twice in a period of time before I have forgotten the first instance escalates the situation greatly. I would prefer the air outside my house not reek of chemicals on the regular. Can’t be healthy.
And thus ends my tale of the Stinky Air Incident. 🤣
Note: There are probably a hundred other explanations for why I stepped onto the front stoop and got slapped in the face with the overwhelming smell of lighter fluid, but this one seems most likely. I love our neighbors. They’re odd in all the right ways.
Yesterday, while looking for a particular book on my crowded shelves, I ran across my old Acer Aspire One netbook. I promptly forgot about the book I was looking for and plugged in the netbook to see if it still ticked at all. It did, but as I dabbled with it off and on over the course of the day, it was obvious it needed a new battery and a bunch of other work to be usable for anything, and even if I did all the things, it still wouldn’t really be usable for much of anything. It was barely usable when it was new! So back on the shelf it went. Was fun messing around with it though, and I did find some long forgotten files on it that I may some day remember to get onto some other device. Or not. Maybe they’re best forgotten!
When the husband came home from work, I told him about messing around with my netbook, and naturally, he thought I was trying to solve my problem of not having a desktop computer with the old netbook. Yes and no. A little bit of me had hoped it would at least work well enough to work on the backend of my websites with, and if it could have done only that, I’d have been very pleased, but no way no how does a netbook replace a desktop. Never did. I do though need some sort of actual computer. Using an iPad for everything is wearing me down. My iPad is great, I love it, and it blows the pants off the old netbook (even when it was brand spanking new), but iPads are also not appropriate for every activity.
This morning I’ve once again explore keyboard cases for the iPad. I’ve regularly checked in on them since my very first iPad. I’ve never bought one. The reviews have always been so mixed, so it’s hard to tell if they are all crap or not. The ones that look like they might be best aren’t cheap, and at the point where I’m spending half the cost of a laptop on a keyboard case, I pause. Not having a physical keyboard is not the only irritation my iPad workflow causes me. Lot of money to solve one problem, you know?
So I continue to get all my computer related work done on my iPad, as I wait impatiently for Apple to come out with the next greatest iMac. I miss my iMac. Not enough to spend money getting a 17 year old computer looked at by someone who could fix it, but I miss having a desktop computer. All the things I need to do are so much easier to do on one. But I want the very newest possible iteration of the iMac, and so I wait on Apple to present one to the public. It’s been a long wait. Too long.
Likely because he’s tired of listening to me complain, the husband has offered to fix up his old laptop for me to use. It really just needs new heat gel put on the processor, irritating to do but not terrible to get done. I’m probably going to pester him about it this weekend, because I’d like to get back to actual computing ASAP. It’ll be the first time I’ve used a Windows PC since 2006, and while generally I’d say I’m not going to enjoy it that much, I don’t know. I’m sure things have changed. It’s possible I adapt, and then I don’t even need a new iMac.
Who am I kidding? Of course I need a new iMac. I’m a member of the Cult of Apple. There is no way I can possibly be deprogrammed. I fell I love with the Apple IIe a million years ago, and then came the Macintosh. I may have been stuck using Windows boxes for ages, but in 2006 I finally got my own Apple computer, and I knew I’d never go back. Until now, because I have to, and I’m going insane trying to get things done on this iPad.