Flowery Friday 4

You're all caught up on flowery photos taken from before the NL trip. I did a bit of an overview on July 27, but that's almost more for documentary purposes, so I'll start with the actual flower photos. If people comment wanting the overview, I can do that.

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 And that's July 27 done. There will be one more at least, maybe 2 more episodes of floweryness this year.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NL)

Film The rocky beach near Port Saunders, working on a long exposure of the waves.

Linda with her gang.

Newfoundland

Near the Port aux Choix lighthouse. I spent a while looking for film compositions, not entirely successfully. Actually, not successfully at all. Sigh.

Odds and ending up with water

Or, like that box of chocolates, you don't know what you're going to get. At this very moment, I don't know what I'm going to give you. 

Tea! Just poured a nice Moroccan mint tea as I started this. After all, it's only 18 C outside, after a while of high 20's and low 30's. It's not winter yet, but soon. All too soon.

The Newfoundland book actually arrived yesterday, and I blogged it on my other blog because it was mostly about photography and encouraging photographers to print their work. Well, it arrived in the sense that I had to go get it, which I had been willing to do on Friday. Still, I'm pleased.

This batch of flowers is still doing well.

I'd written this all up in March and April, but somehow never got around to posting it, even with all the issues with Calgary's water supply.

Looking at our last bill from the City. Water costs us $1.4643 per M3, plus another $1.6905 per M3 for 88% of the water supplied for a wastewater charge. We used 11 M3 from mid Jan to mid Feb, so our fee is 

11 x $1.4643 = $16.11 (rounded up to the nearest cent)

11 x .88 x $1.6905 = $16.36 (rounded down to the nearest cent)

Total of $32.47, or .3 CENTS per litre. Less than a third of a cent per litre for potable water supplied, and wastewater taken away and treated. That's a great deal!

Except we're not done. There's a water service charge of $12.61 and a wastewater service charge of $23.87 on top of the meter rate. There's more stuff on the bill for storm water runoff charges, and a fee for the Black, Blue, and Green carts, but we're going to look past those.

So the actual total cost to us for water supply and removal is $32.47 for usage costs, plus 36.48 for service charges = $68.95, which for 11M3 comes out to just over .6 cents per litre. Still a good deal.

Except, I've no idea how they came up with the service charge amounts, and they just went up dramatically this month. My problem is that I remember Calgary pushing to get water meters installed in all residences, with the idea that people would pay for the amount they used, and fair enough. Except now, as near as I can tell, with the service charges adding up to more than the usage, there is no incentive to save water.

Could we use less than 11 M3 of water in a month? Almost certainly. But say we cut our water use by 10%. That saves me a whole $3 or so, out of a total water related bill of $70 or so. Big whoop, as we used to say. Or lets say we really crack down and cut our water usage to 5 M3. Repeating the above calculations:

5 x $1.4643 = $7.32

5 x .88 x $1.6905 = $7.44

Total of $14.76 or (surprise) .3 CENTS per litre. 

Plus the service charge of $36.48 is a total of $51.24. Big picture, I cut water usage in half, and my bill goes from $68.95 to  $51.24. Not a lot of incentive to cut water usage. 

The bill says the service fees are to cover administration costs. Bah! Things like this are why the populists always howl that they can come in and cut the fat. If the administration costs are more than the cost of the service, I get their point.

(And in a current aside, the water charges and fees add up to a boat load of money that was to support the maintenance of the water system. If it went elsewhere, that's malfeasance by management. If it did go to maintenance that didn't find the breaks before the failure, that's incompetence, or managerial over riding of engineering competence. Heads need to roll at City Hall! And this problem existed long before Gondek was elected.)

The classic economic solution to a shortage of a product is to raise the price to reduce demand, and you keep doing that till demand equals supply. That's fine for many products, but we're talking water here. Essential for life and all.

Just for comparison, when I go to Co-op to buy water for making wine, they charge me $1.99 for 11.3 litres, or  17.6 cents per litre. Supposedly is purified and whatever, but they start with the same water I get from the tap. Some of the bottled water companies start with the same water, don't do anything to it but put it in a plastic bottle, and charge multiple dollars per litre. 

So here we are in September, with more repairs happening to the big pipe that is essential to move water around Calgary, and make efficient use of our treatment plants. They say they'll be done on the 23rd, and I don't know anyone that really believes that. After the initial big break, they started looking for problems. Which I'm pretty sure they already knew about. They found several more and fixed them, then put the pipe back for medium duty service. Then they looked some more and found 20 or so more places that needed fixing.

Does anyone believe that if a chunk of pipe has degraded so badly that it MUST be repaired right now, that the pipe immediately up or down stream is just fine? No, I didn't think so. I will bet money that at some point in the near future, say within a year, there will be more repairs to that pipe. And more, and more, until they rip the whole thing out of the ground and replace it. Let's hope that first they build out piping for alternate paths for water supply. 

But that would require planning.

And I'm not going to talk about the Green Line and planning. Not gonna.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

A nice view of one of the nicest chunks of driftwood that I've ever come across. This is Tata beach. You've seen other photos of it periodically.

Driftwood (NL)

This is as found, with a dramatic backdrop.

Film I have to come clean. This is not as found.

Linda, also film.

Found during an evening stroll in Twillingate.

Newfoundland

More of the dramatic backdrop. Arches Provincial Park.

Delays

I'm cranky at the moment about delays. The big one was UPS telling me my book was going to arrive yesterday, Friday. I hung around the house, keeping an eye out. I didn't worry too much about it till mid afternoon or so, because that's often when the fleet of delivery trucks show up. 

Nothing.

Nothing.

Then when I'm checking the tracking code it says delivery was attempted a few minutes after 3. Not. Oh so not. There was someone in the front room the entire afternoon, and we would have noticed the UPS truck. 

But now when I look, it says

Beats me what someone was doing shuffling a package around at 4 am Saturday morning. So I don't know what is actually happening to my package. The local UPS point is over in Willow Park but they don't have it, and don't expect it till Monday. They aren't sure if it will come to them, and they'll call me to pick up if it does, or if it will stay on the truck to be delivered on Monday.

Sigh. We have friends coming over on Sunday and I was hoping to show it off. At least the other person who bought the book got it as expected. 

Still, it's still amazing to me that the whole parcel delivery service works as well as it does. And when I think about it, pushing that publish button kicked of a chain of events. A stream of ones and zeros that describe the words of the text, the font, the size and the spacing, plus all the data needed for the photos go into a computer that prints everything out, then it gets bound into a book, packaged up, and sent for delivery. I don't know how much human hands are involved in this. I pushed publish on the 25, so less than 2 weeks to get a book in my hands is pretty amazing.

I'm signed up for a darkroom course at SAIT over the next semester. I started developing my own black and white film a couple months ago when Paul retired and moved to Nova Scotia. It's less trouble than I thought, and kind of fun so I decided to try developing colour. I have the chemistry, but there's two issues before I start developing.

One is that the chemistry has a limited lifespan once mixed. While I have some film ready to be developed, I want to build a plan to expose the rest while the chemistry is good. Then again, the chemistry is not expensive, about the cost of getting one roll developed at a lab. The kit says it will do 16 rolls of film, and the guy at the camera store says it's not a surprise if it does 20 rolls. So I suppose even if I only develop a few rolls, I'm still ahead of the game. Hmmm, now that I'm thinking about it, I should figure out how to dispose of it. (Take it to the local fire station in a sealed labelled container, in case you were wondering.)

Two is Calgary's water woes. The darkroom course has put in a week's delay to cut down on water use. As I look at the instructions, there's lots of rinsing between development steps, so it's not a surprise if the same is true for darkroom printing. Plus the mixed chemicals have to be at very specific temperatures, and the easy way to do that is to put the chemical storage jars in a pail with tap water as a heating medium using a sous vide machine. Meanwhile, the pail I'm thinking about using has rainwater in it, which Linda is using to water her garden. Which is still hanging in there, kind of to my surprise, given the heat. The backyard thermometer says 34 just now.

My thinking is to learn the darkroom process from a pro, and decide if that's something I want to do. I might well meet someone that has basic darkroom equipment and is looking to share costs. Or I'll discover it's fun, and I'll set up a darkroom in my basement. I'm already thinking about a book that includes darkroom prints. More on that as it happens.

The land side of Cape Spear Lighthouse. This is as far east as you can get in North America. 

As a side note, I've been close to the most western point in Canada, which is along the Yukon Alaska border, by getting to Kluane Lake. North I've been to the Arctic Circle, which is nowhere near the furthest north point. As for south, Windsor Ontario. 

I digress. Where was I? Now I've lost track. I blame the heat.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NL)

Film

The first place we ate in NL, though this photo was taken several days later during a walk and food truck festival.

Linda posing with some squid art.

Newfoundland

Language

This was originally written early 2023, and has languished in the drafts folder. Not sure why. I just hope I didn't use it in another blog somehow. I'm sure one of my devoted readers would point me to it, and then I'll mea culpa or something.

1. St. John's harbour, just because.

A friend noticed that my words relating to photography have changed lately and asked about it. There was a short answer and that's all we had time for, but I've been reflecting about language, and society, and how we do things. 

The actual question was why was I using the word "exposed" in relation to taking film photographs, as opposed to the word "shot", in a sentence like this, "I shot/exposed several rolls of film during our trip."

Some of the terms related to photography are also related to guns and war and hunting. Perhaps that's because wartime photography was one staples of the classic photo journal magazines. The words shot and shoot are used in a variety photographic contexts. Trigger is sometimes used to mean clicking the camera shutter, or setting up lights that fire (another word) the lighting system. Run and gun refers to a style of street photography. Some photographers talk about stalking their prey. 

All of these are words of violence used for what is almost always a peaceful and quiet pastime. We work with a model to create an image. It's a collaboration. Why would we say model photo shoot? It's lazy language, and I'm trying to change.

I'll say photo session, exposing film, create an image, synchronizing lights, or at least I try to. There's a lifetime of habit built up, and sometimes it's not easy to change. Much the same goes for gender related language. If someone tells me their name is Ken, that's what I'll call them, and not interrogate them to find out if it's Kenneth or Kendra. They tell me that their pronoun is 'they' or 'them', and I'm fine with it. 

I don't know that it was a deliberate choice, but lots of our language normalizes violence and the gun culture. We need look no further than the United States for what happens when gun culture is allowed to take over. They think children being shot in schools isn't a problem worth solving. They would rather let man-children strut around thinking they might get to be a hero by using their gun. 

My take is that we should ban all automatic and semi-automaic firearms as a general rule, and create exceptions as needed for police, military, and probably very few others. Don't get me started on the phrase, "law-abiding gun owners." You don't hear about law-abiding car owners when rules relating to cars are discussed, and there's more rules about cars than Carter has pills, as my grandfather liked to say. 

But in some cases we think language is important. Drop 3 f-bombs in a movie and it's restricted, no matter how placid the rest of it is. The amount of violent crimes depicted in the movie doesn't matter. Call someone a liar in the House of Commons, and you'll be ejected, even if it's true. 

Listen to rock and roll music lyrics. There are endless variations on the theme that the girl belongs to the boy, that she is property, that he can win her, that he can regulate her behaviour, that he's been wronged if she leaves him for another boy, and on and on. Don't get me started on rap.

Even with all the changes and advancements women have made, we still hear:

He is assertive, she is bossy or aggressive.

He is direct, she is abrasive.

He is passionate, she is emotional.

He is honest, she is judgmental.

He is quick, she is impulsive.

He is an expert, she is a show off.

It goes on and on. Just recently, a male Conservative MP impled a female Liberal Minister wasn't tough in terms of relations with China. And yet anyone watching the news would see emotional men having a breakdown because their statements are questioned. We see competent women trying to thread the impossible needle of trying to assert their position and being called too pushy, or working with the group and being called weak. They are called shrill because their voices are often higher than mens by a biological fact.

Language matters. Lots of people don't understand that. They say stupid hurtful things, and they try to pass it off by saying they were joking. They were't. When someone calls them on it, they complain about being the victims of a PC culture, or being cancelled. They don't seem to get that there are sometimes consequences for words and actions.

I can remember the spate of airplane hi-jackings in the 60's and 70's, leading to an increase in security at airports. Lots of people were offended that they couldn't make jokes about bombs or guns in the security lineup. It took a few decades, but everyone knows you simply don't do that now. 

I have my own opinions about security theatre confiscating items so dangerous they can't be allowed on an airplane, and yet they are tossed into a barrel with all the other dangerous items to be taken to a landfill, but I'm not going to spout them in the line up to get through the x-ray machine.

Society has changed. There's a lot more humans around now, and we have to make accommodations. Some words have become so offensive there is no way they can be used in polite company. Just like the freedom to swing your fist ends at someone else's face, the freedom to spout hateful words ends with someone else hearing them.

Here's a short day trip from just before the Newfoundland trip. This is a walk with the film camera in what is normally the Glenmore Reservoir. However the water levels were so low it was like walking through a desert. This was along the south side, ending up at the bridge over the Elbow. The film is Kodak Gold 200.

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Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NL)

Film One of the waterfalls on Cameron Creek upstream of the townsite.

Linda

Newfoundland

Right on the edge. It isn't really all that far down this time, but it's a messy landing.

Recent books, not mine

Starting with a photo book, of course. How had I never actually heard of George Hunter? I'd seen some of his images. So have you, whether you know it or not. George Hunter's Canada is filled with wonderful images mostly from years past, when Canada was young.

I don't read a lot of fiction these days, but saw this in the library by chance and picked it up. It turned out to be a 'boy finds his destiny' story, with some cryptic puzzles thrown in. Turned out to be a fast and easy read. The Fellowship of Puzzle Makers by Samuel Burr.

This is almost more a chemistry course than a photography book. It was interesting reading over the overview of the old chemical processes that used to be needed to create a photograph, but the rest is the actual chemistry and how to, which is less interesting till the time comes to actually try it. Then it would be perfect. In the mean time I'm sticking with commercial film and developing it myself.

And no, I don't have a delivery date for the NL book yet, which is a bit of a surprise.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NL)

Arches Provincial Park.

Film

Sean will recognize this tree and bridge. I was out to finish a roll of a film stock I didn't particularly like. For complicated reasons I wanted to capture this bridge from roughly this vantage point, and knew there were a couple possible trees to use as foreground. The province is doing some work on the pathways near there, so it was a bit tricky getting there.

Linda on top of the Twillingate overlook tower, overlooking.

Newfoundland