When life gives you kidney stones, make lemonade.
I got the results back from my first-ever full physical exam, and the results were good! The EKG was normal, my total cholesterol was 175, and my blood sugar was 80. The result of the study mandated by my urologist, however, showed two things wrong with my urinary system.
1. I don't drink enough, so I'm not producing enough urine in a day to keep the solids in the urine diluted and thus less likely to crystallize inside my kidneys. The total amount of urine I produced in the urine test was around 1.75 L over the course of 48 hours; the doc wants me to drink enough to produce 2 L of urine per day!
2. I'm lacking an important substance in healthy urine called citrate. It helps to inhibit the formation of stones in the kidney, and its main source in the diet is from citrus fruit. So, I've been told I need to start upping my intake of citrate mostly through drinking lots of lemonade made from real lemon juice, and I've been put on a a twice-daily regimen of Urocit-K, a potassium citrate supplement.
The class I co-taught on film developing went well. Shortly after that day I made my first serious blunder, accidentally pouring blix solution into my developer bottle, effectively ruining my color developer. Because these color developing kits are mixed from powder, you have to mix up the entire thing and any stupid mistake like the one I made renders the whole thing useless. So now, I'm switching to a liquid concentrate kit. I can mix up only as much volume as I think I can reuse until it exhausts, and if I make another big mistake it only costs me that small batch. Also, this kit adheres more closely to the color C-41 process standard, using both bleach and fix instead of a combined blix, so it's probably more archival-quality. Assuming I get all the reuses I want out of it, the kit should also be more cost-effective. Now I just have to go out and shoot more color film. I'm finding Fuji Superia to be a remarkable inexpensive film that gives great results, and I'll try pushing some of it soon.
I didn't buy any more cameras for an entire month, but a couple weeks ago I fell off the wagon for a beautiful late-1950s Ricoh 500 rangefinder, an ugly duckling that has a film advance lever tucked away on the underside of the camera. And soon I'll be receiving in the mail my first Russian-made camera, a Zenit ET: a M42-mount SLR, complete with the name on the front in Cyrillic lettering (ЗЕНИТ). Because of some bonus eBay credit, I ended up paying only about $7 for it, shipping included.
1. I don't drink enough, so I'm not producing enough urine in a day to keep the solids in the urine diluted and thus less likely to crystallize inside my kidneys. The total amount of urine I produced in the urine test was around 1.75 L over the course of 48 hours; the doc wants me to drink enough to produce 2 L of urine per day!
2. I'm lacking an important substance in healthy urine called citrate. It helps to inhibit the formation of stones in the kidney, and its main source in the diet is from citrus fruit. So, I've been told I need to start upping my intake of citrate mostly through drinking lots of lemonade made from real lemon juice, and I've been put on a a twice-daily regimen of Urocit-K, a potassium citrate supplement.
The class I co-taught on film developing went well. Shortly after that day I made my first serious blunder, accidentally pouring blix solution into my developer bottle, effectively ruining my color developer. Because these color developing kits are mixed from powder, you have to mix up the entire thing and any stupid mistake like the one I made renders the whole thing useless. So now, I'm switching to a liquid concentrate kit. I can mix up only as much volume as I think I can reuse until it exhausts, and if I make another big mistake it only costs me that small batch. Also, this kit adheres more closely to the color C-41 process standard, using both bleach and fix instead of a combined blix, so it's probably more archival-quality. Assuming I get all the reuses I want out of it, the kit should also be more cost-effective. Now I just have to go out and shoot more color film. I'm finding Fuji Superia to be a remarkable inexpensive film that gives great results, and I'll try pushing some of it soon.
I didn't buy any more cameras for an entire month, but a couple weeks ago I fell off the wagon for a beautiful late-1950s Ricoh 500 rangefinder, an ugly duckling that has a film advance lever tucked away on the underside of the camera. And soon I'll be receiving in the mail my first Russian-made camera, a Zenit ET: a M42-mount SLR, complete with the name on the front in Cyrillic lettering (ЗЕНИТ). Because of some bonus eBay credit, I ended up paying only about $7 for it, shipping included.