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