I second that emulsion
On Sunday, July 4, we were out at Sam's Club doing some shopping, accompanied by our friend and fellow club member Jack, when Danny's cell phone rang. "Help... help... help..." said a high-pitched voice, over and over, and Danny couldn't get the voice to say what was wrong. The caller ID didn't identify the caller and we thought it might be a prank call, but after about a minute of this Danny said he thought it sounded like his sister T., who still lives in their hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. So he hung up and called T.'s number: sure enough it was her. He told her to call 911 and we raced home to contact the local sheriff's office to get her help. It turns out she'd called 911, but their personnel couldn't triangulate her position accurately enough with only her own cell signal, so they were grateful Danny called them.
Theresa had suffered a stroke, possibly a double one. As we'd find out later, she'd collapsed in her home on Friday after what seemed to be a stroke, and had laid there on the floor of her home, blacked out, until she regained consciousness on Sunday afternoon and called us. She had no recollection of any events in between. We resisted the urge to go see her immediately, since we'd be able to do nothing for her until her condition stabilized anyway. Last weekend took as much time off work as we could muster on short notice and make the drive out there from Memphis to see her and to tend to her affairs.
She was still looking extremely frail when we arrived at the hospital, but during the weekend she improved immensely. As of now she can now eat light foods, talk some, and walk very well with the assistance of a walker. Soon after the paramedics broke into her house and took her to the hospital, the sheriff's took her eight (!) miniature Schnauzer dogs to the local Animal Control facility and promised Danny they'd give him until the end of the month free to provide for them. Long story short, we were able persuade an acquaintance of ours to take them into his care until T. is able to get them back. But when we went to T.'s house to fetch some personal items for her and to assess the damage from the paramedics' break-in, we found ourselves being assaulted by fleas! I ran like the dickens out of that house, brushed myself down until I could see no more of the nasty critters, and cowered in our van until Danny emerged with her things. The next day, we brought enough flea-bombing products to bomb Dresden and set them off inside the house.
Anyway, all's well that ends well, but the worry and the fleas and the long drive and having to go right back to work afterwards wore us out so thoroughly that only now are we recovering from it. I even begged off going early Saturday morning to the Scott Kelby's Third Annual Worldwide Photo Walk, thinking I could catch up on my sleep. As luck would have it, though, I'd started to get some sort of allergy/sinus bug (possibly from inhaling crap from T.'s house), and woke up at the crack of dawn anyway. So much for that plan.
Because I've paid down my credit cards rather well, and in preparation for our trip to the Argonauts/Castaways run in Wisconsin next month, I bought myself a couple of new toys I've been wanting: a Sekonic L-358 light meter, and an Epson Perfection V600 Photo scanner. The light meter will allow me to better calibrate my flashes and control flash-to-ambient exposure ratios with less guesswork. I'd been pessimistic about my film camera skills up until now because scans of my film have looked horrendous, but scanning the film anew with my new Epson have renewed my love for old-school photography and film developing. The differences between my old scans and my new scans have been truly eye-opening. On my last trip to Arkansas, my mother gave me a craptastic no-name Chinese-made 35mm camera, so I've loaded some 400 speed B&W film into it and we'll see how it fares. Heck, the back closure is so terrible it's almost guaranteed to cause light leaks, but sometimes the worst cameras can make interesting effects. When we were in Greenville last weekend, I spied a Meikai crap 35mm camera, new in the box, in Danny's mother's house. I should have taken it home with us, but I'll snatch it next time I'm there.
Theresa had suffered a stroke, possibly a double one. As we'd find out later, she'd collapsed in her home on Friday after what seemed to be a stroke, and had laid there on the floor of her home, blacked out, until she regained consciousness on Sunday afternoon and called us. She had no recollection of any events in between. We resisted the urge to go see her immediately, since we'd be able to do nothing for her until her condition stabilized anyway. Last weekend took as much time off work as we could muster on short notice and make the drive out there from Memphis to see her and to tend to her affairs.
She was still looking extremely frail when we arrived at the hospital, but during the weekend she improved immensely. As of now she can now eat light foods, talk some, and walk very well with the assistance of a walker. Soon after the paramedics broke into her house and took her to the hospital, the sheriff's took her eight (!) miniature Schnauzer dogs to the local Animal Control facility and promised Danny they'd give him until the end of the month free to provide for them. Long story short, we were able persuade an acquaintance of ours to take them into his care until T. is able to get them back. But when we went to T.'s house to fetch some personal items for her and to assess the damage from the paramedics' break-in, we found ourselves being assaulted by fleas! I ran like the dickens out of that house, brushed myself down until I could see no more of the nasty critters, and cowered in our van until Danny emerged with her things. The next day, we brought enough flea-bombing products to bomb Dresden and set them off inside the house.
Anyway, all's well that ends well, but the worry and the fleas and the long drive and having to go right back to work afterwards wore us out so thoroughly that only now are we recovering from it. I even begged off going early Saturday morning to the Scott Kelby's Third Annual Worldwide Photo Walk, thinking I could catch up on my sleep. As luck would have it, though, I'd started to get some sort of allergy/sinus bug (possibly from inhaling crap from T.'s house), and woke up at the crack of dawn anyway. So much for that plan.
Because I've paid down my credit cards rather well, and in preparation for our trip to the Argonauts/Castaways run in Wisconsin next month, I bought myself a couple of new toys I've been wanting: a Sekonic L-358 light meter, and an Epson Perfection V600 Photo scanner. The light meter will allow me to better calibrate my flashes and control flash-to-ambient exposure ratios with less guesswork. I'd been pessimistic about my film camera skills up until now because scans of my film have looked horrendous, but scanning the film anew with my new Epson have renewed my love for old-school photography and film developing. The differences between my old scans and my new scans have been truly eye-opening. On my last trip to Arkansas, my mother gave me a craptastic no-name Chinese-made 35mm camera, so I've loaded some 400 speed B&W film into it and we'll see how it fares. Heck, the back closure is so terrible it's almost guaranteed to cause light leaks, but sometimes the worst cameras can make interesting effects. When we were in Greenville last weekend, I spied a Meikai crap 35mm camera, new in the box, in Danny's mother's house. I should have taken it home with us, but I'll snatch it next time I'm there.