Oct 8 - activities for a rainy day

It rained all day. That was the prediction and that's what happened. That's my story and I'm sticking to it ...

What does one do on a rainy day ? ...

-- developed a roll of film
-- copied some more of Dad's video's to disk
-- watched US Secretary of the Treasury Paulson give his "uplifting" speech (the market subsequently went down)
-- watched some more Stargate Atlantis
-- watched some CNN debate & political analysis

Notice that none of these are exactly strenuous activities !

On the first ... yes, I developed a roll of film and it is currently being scanned. That is not the entire story though -- I had shot two rolls and after getting the chemicals all warmed up and ready I started the development process. I was trying to keep all the chemicals at 25C with a couple of the bottles lying down in the warming bath and then as I changed from developer 1 to developer 2, I blew it. This is the first time that I can remember really screwing up on film development ... I went ahead and put in developer 2 then onto bleach ... then realized that what I had put in as developer 2 was actually the stabilizer that I had in my hand moving out of the warming bath. Well, the chemicals don't contaminate moving forward in the development cycle but they definitely do moving backward -- so I now had some stabilizer in the bleach and some developer 1 in the stabilizer (which normally comes after a wash cycle) -- throw out the stabilizer first and later I threw out the bleach.

All this occurred because I was doing things that I don't normally do -- the bath is setup for 4 containers of chemicals and I was using 6, and in juggling the bottles I messed up. Anyway, so those two films were ruined. There's nothing lost -- they were just lots of test pictures anyway, but there might have been some good fall colour pictures on the one roll.

Anyway, shoot another roll and develop that roll -- the density still looks light compared with some of my historical films (I compared to several films in my negative files). It's not way out of line though -- not too far off the other "Gold 100" films that are in my files but a lot lighter than the Ektar and Agfa films. Anyway, this is when I threw out that bleach and decided to try making my own batch of bleach with the chemicals that I'd purchased. My next roll will be with home-brew bleach (try saying that one over and over again quickly !).

At this rate I'll use up all my old film quickly ! I think that I only have 3-4 rolls left. What I might do with the next roll is cut it up into two or three pieces and develop them separately because I still need to test out different development times -- my old Flexicolor development chart recommends 6.5 minutes in bleach but the online recipe calls for 2.5 minutes in bleach -- that is quite a difference and since the online recipe is developing at 25C vs 35C you'd think that it would be longer, not shorter ... hmmm.

More home movies -- I'm now seeing Philip, Meaghan and Olivia on the screen playing with sparklers. They just finished fishing -- oh, now they're lighting off some other fireworks -- must be July 1st ? -- yes, that's the date that is now showing on the screen -- Canada Day 1992.

Most of this video is of ducks. My dad raised an entire litter of Mallards (12 ducks) one year from an abandoned nest -- he was the 'father duck' with a pen for them up by the garage. They would follow him down to the lake to play and then back to the garage 'home'. They are getting bigger now (by July 5th) and in later videos he probably has Mom film him taking them flying with the boat -- he drove the boat. At the end of the summer they would still be hanging around the area -- oh, some typical Mallard colours are beginning to show -- and then they migrated in the fall. He always wondered if any of them came back -- he probably should have banded them to see. This is probably the only instance of an entire brood of ducks making it to the end of the summer. Usually fish and foxes get more than half of them while they're young.

When I was a kid he did something similar with a nest of snapping turtle eggs. No, they didn't follow him around ... we kept them in an aquarium and my job was catching tadpoles etc. for their food. I don't remember how some of them died but we did keep 6 over the winter and let them go the following spring -- getting much larger by that point !

Of course then there was the year that he raised a bunch of chickens from chicks that turned out to be roosters and he had to butcher them early ... and then there were the rabbits that we bred -- we used to eat a lot of rabbit ... and the budgies ... my cousins used to call him Uncle Budgie (he went by Bud all his life). For many years we had upwards of 70 budgies -- first in the basement and later in a garden house / shed at the back of the property in North Bay. He would supply a local pet store with budgies -- just for fun, this was not for profit -- and of course after you raise chickens there is something that you can do with them but budgies don't look like much on a plate ...

He probably would have continued to raise things but once our lifestyle changed to spending significant amounts of time at the cottage and then later to being snowbirds, there was no way that he could do anything other than small projects -- like the ducks. Even with the ducks he would have been tied to the cottage for the 2-3 months that it took to get them raised.

Oh -- the sun has just poked over the trees. The next few days are supposed to be beautiful fall weather -- sunny and warmer.

Mya was out of sorts yesterday, always wanting to pee and poop and restless. We gave her rice for supper and for breakfast, obviously something has upset her stomach. Perhaps she was eating some leaves ... she seemed better this morning so perhaps that's done.

That's it for now ...

That's it for now.