Profiles in courage:
Baseball Season has begun, with teams reporting in the little leagues around here. My own future all-star has a team assignment and one practice under his belt. I decided to take him out this afternoon and get some throwing, catching and hitting in (the hitting was his idea).
Picture yourself pitching (if you can call the wild, untameable slop I throw pitching) to a hitter who only likes to hit balls inside. For him to get a hit, I have to throw over the inner part of the plate. Yuck. Luckily for both of us, I was able to get a few across without a hit batsman, ie, having to explain to his mom that almost 9 years of hard work was all for naught, as I had removed our son’s head with an errant pitch.
Then it was his turn to hurl a few, but he wanted a catcher. So I ended up on the receiving end of his stuff. It went pretty well, when he took his time (meaning I was only in danger if I failed to pay attention, not from any intentional shots to my unhelmeted head). When he was distracted, he was wild and I was only in danger of being hit by ricochets off the backstop (two or three of those).
Adventures in photography:
The baseball practice was at the old Sand Point naval station, so while they got started on all that, I took the old pinhole camera down around the hangars to see what I could find. I really began to think things weren’t right when I kept winding on film without getting a sense I was going to run out. So when we got home, I tossed the camera, the tank, and the 120 reel in the changing bag and used some refreshingly adult language as I worked to get the film on the reel. I have never handled 120 film before and in hindsight, it might have made sense to get hold of an old past-the-sell-by date roll and practice this in daylight. Take that as a suggestion if you ever get the urge to work with 100+ year old film technology.
So I got on the reel, with some certainty that the film is not wound on correctly and probably touching. I tore the paper backing off and was struck by the disturbing realization that it might have been in there backwards the whole time, meaning that non-photosensitive paper backing was facing the light/image source, and the other side facing the back of the camera, slowly absorbing the light through the counter hole (through which I never saw a number, merely blackness).
Chemistry is mixed and cooling (D-76 get mixed at temperatures hotter than my water heater produces, so I had to microwave some of the water to get the desired temperature of 131℉). I will try and process the film tomorrow. If this turns out to have been a wasted effort, I will have my practice film in hand, at any rate.
Adult Entertainment:
The young’uns were attendees at an evening ‘do at their school Friday night, which freed up their parents to go out for a meal at a place that didn’t supply crayons, didn’t have cups with lids, or cater to anyone special at all. Café Lago was our destination, and I can concur with a friend who said their lasagna was the best in the world: I’ve had plenty, and made more than a few, but this was on another plane entirely. I had gnocchi, a dish I try when I can find it.
It justified my beliefs about Italian creativity: you give a potato to the English, they boil it; the Swiss, they fry it; the French, they sauce it. But the Italians give us Potato Gatto and Gnocchi, two things it would never occur to anyone else to come up with.
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