Work is picking up and I hope to finish the interview for the webmaster job at the beginning of next week. Waiting on the possibility of a new job, waiting to move, waiting for a new manager in my current position can be deadly to getting anything done other than inventing ways to do nothing at all until it blows over. I assume there are mythical beings out there who are energized by moving and changing jobs and managers, but I've not met any or at least any I've been able to recognize so I could view them up close and see how they tick. I wouldn't recognize the signs anyway, recognizing people with different realities is difficult. Everybody has the friend who's married the same son of a bitch/bitch over and over again, teaching the lesson that when your expectations about people are set in cement, you can't really compute the signals coming from people who are arranged differently. If all men are scoundrels, a man who isn't a scoundrel will act and communicate in ways that make no sense at all so you'll think him crazy and pass on by.

I still haven't sent the family pictures to my aunt in Seattle, but I'll pack them up and send them Monday. I had half of one roll full of double exposures, the first set of exposures having been done perhaps as much as six months ago on color print film and then, for some reason, rewound and put aside. It went unmarked back into the refrigerator only to be scooped up when I put together the film for my trip. I remember one roll having a longer leader than usual and wondered at the time, but the idea that I'd rewound a roll and then forgot about it didn't even occur. How do you do that?

The first set of exposures were done as an experiment in my apartment of one of the little inflatable alien creatures you can buy most anywhere from drug stores to street vendors. I might have hoped the juxtaposition of a weird blue alien with big eyes on top of some of my family members might have turned out at least one kinda cool off the wall shot, but no, nothing. Just a bunch of pictures that never made it to print. Hi, ho. I've been doing this pretty consistently recently and I'm going to chalk it up to jaw operations, moving, work, the moon, and stupidity, which seems to float about in my air these days. I've talked of things to change this condition, particularly with the photography, and I'm going to do them, by golly, but after I pack.

The shot of Ola's son at a Dim Sum restaurant when a bunch of us went to lunch last week isn't bad. Shot on Kodak TMY, an ISO 400 film with a decent grain structure. The photograph was taken using available light and I'd like to compare the results with others using TMX, an ISO 100 film as well as the old Kodak standard Tri-X (ISO 400). I used Tri-X exclusively many years ago (that's all they had then) and I always liked the results, but TMY has a much finer grain structure than the older film and the TMX is remarkably better. Finer grain isn't necessarily an advantage. There are times when grain adds a lot to a photograph, particularly when you want to capture some nice down home Dr. Caligari moments for your scrapbook. Photographs like the one above work well with finer grain. Photographs of strange people on dark street corners often work better with lots of grain. Similarly, shots of political events, hospital interiors and serial killers behind bars, turn out better as well. By the way, that's not in bars, but behind bars.

It's Thursday night and I have the PBS station playing their mystery series behind me, Emma Peel presenting the introductions. Normally I turn it off, since I really can't listen and write at the same time as it's more complicated than walking and chewing gum. The program playing is silly, but I'm liking it so I think I'll wind it up here and retire. Last night it was a shot of whiskey to finish the evening, tonight its PBS.