Scattered Thoughts . . .

I 've been wanting to go back to medium format film since the very beginning of the pandemic.  In fact, I restored a 75 year old folding 6x6 medium format camera in January of 2020 when the pandemic first began (pictured below, at left).  Now it is six years later and I still have not shot any film through that camera but I'm still itching to go back to film alongside my digital photography. I do occasionally shoot some instant medium format film through a twin lens reflex camera (shown in photo below, top center) and I have a medium format film printer that prints any of my digital images on medium format instant film.  My Sony a7 images look great on this film. I suppose the main reason I have delayed shooting any film stock in my older film camera is because I have had COVID twice a year, every year, since January of 2020.  Each time I get this virus, it knocks me down for a few months.  By the time I'm feeling well enough to tackle anything, my list of prior...

W e've had an old, beat-up, dented, filthy range hood residing in our kitchen longer than I myself have lived here.  Shortly after I moved in, I noticed it was an eyesore so I cleaned it up and sprayed a nice new coat of paint on it.  Now it looked a bit better but it didn't work all that well and, as a result, it always seemed to be perpetually covered in slimy grease.  When I moved into this house, the light wasn't working on it anymore either so I replaced the electrical bulb socket too.  This was a "temporary fix" until we were able to renovate the kitchen.  Now it is almost 20 years later and I still have not gotten to renovating the kitchen.  Life and poor health have gotten in the way multiple times. Although we still have not yet gotten to renovating the kitchen, quite a few temporary fixes were done to various parts of the kitchen.  We've been slowly reconfiguring the kitchen to our planned new kitchen.  We never did anything with that ol...

I nside the house throughout the winter, we've always had extremely dry air that dries out our sinuses.  It gets so unbelievably dry that we even have difficulty swallowing while sleeping because our throats and mouths get so dry!  Not only is that annoying but it also makes it a bit difficult to sleep through the night.   To counter this, we've always left a big stock pot of water simmering on the stove.  Unfortunately, this simmering stock pot remedy never seemed to resolve the dry throats and mouths.  It did help increase the humidity in the house but it wasn't effective enough.  This 24 hour a day simmer stock pot idea also caused a pot to rot out on us due to constant use with hard water!  The mineral deposits ate right through that first stock pot.   The humidity in the house drops down below 10% in winter.  For comfort, it really should be in the 40-60% range but the stock pot solution wasn't getting us any higher than around...

W e awoke this morning while it was still dark outside to another blackout due to downed tree limbs covered in heavy ice falling on power lines nearby.  The ice adds too much weight for the branches to bear and it has been a bit windy too which doesn't help.  I think we had power again in about two hours.  That was just long enough for us to collect all of our battery operated lamps, lanterns, flashlights and power stations.  This time of year we worry about freezing pipes but short blackouts aren't a major problem unless they fry electronic components throughout the house and we had that potential today! When we lost power, the power was flickering for about ten or fifteen minutes which caused all sorts of problems with our electronic devices, appliances and entertainment center.  Once we had power back on I quickly realized that all the flickering had pushed everything into "pairing mode".  This meant that I needed to set up each device again.  We al...