I woke up just before sunrise and went downstairs to check the bay window to see if there were any leaks after the rain last night. There were no leaks, but also practically no rain overnight either that I could tell, at least compared to the big storm a couple days ago. So I really don’t know if I fixed the leaks or not. I patched every possible gap and crack I could see where water might get in though, so there’s that anyway. And what rain there was Did hit the front of the house directly like before. There just wasn’t as much of it.

Next step is to tempt fate and put everything back on the bay window shelf and see if it gets leaked on again. Hahahahaha… Sigh.

Before I took a look outside to see what the overnight rain patterns looked like, I checked the thermostat to see how cold it was out there. It told me it was 50 degrees outside. In January. Before sunup.

I got out onto my porch in my cutoffs and a t-shirt and I swear it felt like a spring morning. There were even robins chirping in the trees just like a typical spring morning around here.

Oh wait…it’s Maryland. They’re calling for snow next week…

That storm I spoke of previously hit us Tuesday evening and it brought with it a driving rain the likes of which I’ve never seen around here. I have a roofed over front porch and maybe a few inches of rain around the porch floor is as much as I’ve ever seen. It’s very infrequent that it even reaches the front doorstep. This time the storm completely soaked the front door and the bricks on the front wall, all the way up to the top of the porch ceiling. I’ve never seen that in the 22 years I’ve owned this house.

I staged a step ladder on the second floor so I could poke my head up into the tiny attic space…it isn’t even a crawlspace, just maybe six inches between the roof beams and the ceiling beams…and shine a high intensity flashlight around to check for leaks. It was dry as a bone up there, even during the worst of the storm. The bay window in my living room was another story.

I’d never seen it leaking before. Ever. But those leaks may have all been laying in wait for just the right storm to come along. I got out some buckets and some construction bag liners to divert the water into the buckets, then mopped up as much as I could. It wasn’t a disaster, just something new I had to fix that I wasn’t expecting.

I figured there was some leaks on the outside top of the bay window I needed to take care of next morning. But next day was cold and very windy and I didn’t want to be up on a ladder in that weather. So I put the big ladder up today and took a look at what sort of work I have in store up there, thinking that if I fall over and break my neck at least I’ll have died doing something I love (smirk).

(I was careful to put my Apple watch on before I started climbing the ladder, because it will detect a hard fall and if I don’t respond it will alert my brother and call 911 for me, giving them my GPS coordinates.)

There was nothing there that I could see that would even possibly be a way for water to get in. I judged the area around the window frame when it meets the brick might use a touch of that rubber sealant I bought, but it seemed pretty solid. The brickwork above it was another story.

See…my little Baltimore rowhouse only has front and back outside walls, and they are brick veneer over concrete block. What I saw were several largish holes in the mortar between the bricks where water could easily get in between the brick and the concrete block, assuming the rain was being driven hard in that direction, and then run down to the inside top of the window.

Normally this would not happen since rain doesn’t hit that side of the house very hard. Yes it gets wet, but windy driving rains here tend to come from either the east or west, not the south and they don’t hit the face of the house with a lot of force. But at the right angle those holes in the mortar could easily have let in the rain water that was dripping from the inside top of my bay window. Repointing the brick is going to be expensive and I’ve nowhere near that kind of money set aside just yet. But it couldn’t be done in the winter anyway.

Here’s where city life came in handy. So I’m taking my morning walk around the neighborhood thinking about what to do about those holes in the mortar before the next storm arrives…maybe squirt some Henry’s into them…when I walk past an end of group unit with someone on a ladder up against the side of the house, and it looks like they’re dealing with the same brickwork problem I have. Bear in mind all the houses here are the same basic floorplan, the only difference with that one was it’s an end of group unit so it had three exposed walls to the weather.

So I go over and ask him if he’s a contractor or the homeowner. He says he’s a brother-in-law. We chat for a bit. Seems his bother’s side windows were leaking during that last storm just like my bay window was, and likely for the same reason. What are you using in those holes, I ask. He shows me a tube of fibrous mortar patch, and explains how that’s better to use in this weather, and doesn’t cause a problem with repointing the bricks later.

I make a mental note of the product thinking I’ll go get some. Then he says he has an extra tube he won’t need and he’ll sell it to me for what he paid for it. I love city life.

I squirted that stuff into the holes, and a few large cracks, in the mortar above my bay window. Then I ran some of that spray rubber sealant around the edges of the window frame. Now we wait.

I’ll keep the buckets handy. Thing is, if there are no more leaks but the rain doesn’t hit the house this time like it did last time, I still won’t know if I fixed the right problem or not.

Turns out there is a significant amount of debugging involved in owning a house.

Running the vacuum cleaner after tracking in bird seed shells and leaves from working outside. Noticing (this is for all you old people reading this) that I no longer see static on the TV screen when I run the vacuum.

Nate Postlethwait, who I follow on Facebook, writes about healing from childhood trauma, but I find that much of what he says makes sense from the point of view of gay adults like myself, who had to endure decades of emotional abuse starting in adolescence, when our sexual orientation began to make itself insistent. You can argue that we started feeling it even before then, when it was only a half awareness that we were different somehow, in some really really bad way, that we had to hide from the world, and ourselves…

A Coming Out Story – Episode 18, What I Learned About Homosexuality Part 2

…but it was when those first crushes happened that you really knew you weren’t just different, you were an abomination. And back when I came of age, the abuse came from every direction. From the pulpit of course, but also from the TV, the newspapers, the magazines…

A Coming Out Story – Intermission – What I Learned About Homosexuality. . . And Myself (Part 2)

And it did its work on you, even if, like me, you came out to yourself in the magic of first love. I was 17 and I thought it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. And I never felt a shred of shame about it. He was beautiful. He was decent. He was the sort of guy I could have brought home to mom in a better world, knowing she would take to him instantly and approve of our relationship. But it wasn’t that better world that I came of age in.

In my early twenties I went to my first Pride Day in downtown Washington DC’s gay neighborhood. Anita Bryant had waged a war on a simple non-discrimination law protecting gay people by throwing every filthy lie about us she could think up and it went down in flames. I was angry, and motivated to activism. I swore I would not allow the homophobia I just witnessed to touch my heart.

But it did. I’m 70 now. I will die having walked an entire adult life without finding love, with the scars all over my heart. Proud though I was, I came of age in a dating pool that was mostly terrified, or in denial. For a while I would post stories every Valentine’s Day about being a young gay man trying to find love in a culture that threw contempt and hate at us from every direction…

The magnitude of what was taken from us, so righteous people could make their stepping stones to heaven out of the pieces of our hearts, is nearly impossible to grasp.

And I have tried for decades to understand that mindset. The books I have read. The studies I have examined. The conversations I’ve sat in on. And I’m thinking, What’s Wrong With Them??? No, seriously, what the Hell Is Wrong With Them??? Read about Christian Identity, the religion of the Neo-Nazis sometime and see if it doesn’t make your head spin.

I have never found any answers I could be satisfied with. But now at last, at the doorstep to 70, I think maybe I can just let go of the question.

Postlethwait put this up on his Facebook page today…

It feels so much like just throwing up your hands and giving up, and that runs against every inner instinct I have. I’m a geek…I have to know. It might even be hard wired into me like my sexual orientation. But I’ve done my best and all I have to show for it is a better understanding of how bigotry and hate embodies in people, how culture shapes the forms it takes, how to recognize the bedrock of hate in mass movements though they may claim a landscape of heritage, faith, and moral tradition. All that is good, but the why of it is as elusive as ever.

It can be that. The physicist Richard Feynman once wrote…

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”

There’s a scene in the TV miniseries, The Winds of War, I forget which episode now but it taps me on the shoulder at times, with Pug in FDR’s rail car and he’s talking to the president about what he’s seen and experienced in Germany. FDR says wistfully that Germans are a hard people to understand, and Pug replies “The only thing we need to know about the Germans is how to beat them.” Now, that’s a military man talking and I can appreciate that from his vantage point that’s really all he needs to know about a potential enemy. But FDR would want to know more because his job isn’t as focused on the one thing that Pug’s is. Still, it’s a good line. I’ve thought of it often during the course of this civil rights struggle.

The only thing we need to know about bigots is how to beat them. You will never make sense of their hate because there is no sense to it.

Activism can be a way of not dealing with your personal pain, even as you acknowledge it. And prejudice taught me there was something wrong with me. Despite all the activism and all the pride, deep down inside I believed it.

I’m my father’s son. I’m the product of a broken home. An only child. Weird. Not masculine enough. Takes excessive interest in personal art projects, as my first grade teacher wrote in my file. The kid that uses big words. Introverted. Homosexual. Ugly. No fashion sense. 

This is how being bullied, not just by the other kids but by adults in your life, corrodes your sense of self. There was nothing wrong with me. I was a kid, finding his way in the world like all the others. And if you’re reading this and you feel it too, then know that there was nothing wrong with you.

I’m my father’s son, but I am not my father. I was raised by a single divorced mother but she loved me and set a good example for me and I’ll have the so-called broken home I grew up in over every traditional family I’ve ever witnessed that can’t stop fighting with each other. Only children aren’t the selfish self centered stereotypes we’re made to be; self motivation and independence are our strengths. We make friends and fall in love like everyone else, but we are almost preternaturally good at keeping ourselves company and we are not going to beg for your attention. Gay people experience the joys of love and desire like anyone else. Introverts just need a little more quiet time than others is all; we get that time to recharge and we’re fine. Ugly is as much a slur as any racist slur against the person within because of how they look. There is no such thing as having excessive interest in your art because art is the joy of being alive. I didn’t use big words so much as I had a big vocabulary because I read so much, and that’s a good thing because reading grows you from inside. If there is no such thing as having an excessive interest in your art, there is also no such thing as having too many books. And I have lived long enough now to see fashions come and go and all you need is to be good with what you see in the mirror.

Sensibility. For when senselessness rears it’s stupid head. You don’t need to know the why of it. There is nothing wrong with you. Do not wear someone else’s labels. It’s not good fashion.

Usually I put the dishes in the dishwasher before bed and let it run overnight, then unpack it the next morning. My mornings are usually pretty aimless these days until I am fully awake. Usually that’s after coffee, my morning exercises, and a morning walk. This is my retirement morning routine I reckon.

But a little tick I’m noticing in myself now is whenever there’s a big storm in the forecast I make double sure to get all the dishes clean and put away, and take care of anything else that needs doing in the kitchen, such as make more ice tea. So when I wake up I don’t have to do anything except make coffee and breakfast, and try to figure out how my day is going while scoping out what’s going on outside.

Weather happens, la de da. I grew up in central Maryland, I am familiar with how the sky does its thing over the seasons. Maryland skies aren’t as dramatic as Florida and Kansas skies, but I have watched them all my life. Our weather is mostly pretty bland compared to elsewhere. The big storms are interlopers, exciting, possibly dangerous, demanding more attention than normal. In the morning I want to be ready.

Looks now like the action here in Charm City is late Tuesday and into early wednesday, then it clears out quickly. But then comes another one. This seems like a pattern settling in. We’ve been somewhat lucky these have been happening in warm air. If one of these happens when we’re getting a cold snap it’s going to dump a ton of snow on us.

This came up in my Facebook memories today and so once again I’m banging the drum about it. 

I shared the following post from an ER nurse back in May of 2014. I had my own heart attack October 2019. When the symptoms started coming onto me I didn’t even think about what she’s saying here, I figured it was just a really bad case of heartburn. Until it felt like a horse was standing on my chest and it scared me. Looking back on it, the heart attack was pretty much like she says here, but for the squeezing feelings in my spine and jaw which I did not have.

And that, in retrospect, is interesting because she’s describing here how a heart attack feels different for most women and I am a cis gender, gay man.

It makes you think a little bit more about human biology. And you should. I’ve often wondered about mine. I have small feet for a guy, size 7 1/2 medium, and frequently have to buy from the ladies side of the shoe store where I have learned to look for a women’s size 9 wide. But my hat size is men’s large. Go figure. I have never felt myself to be transgender in any way. I have always felt completely comfortable in my own body, and in that sense of my own maleness. But if the heart attack taught me anything it’s that there is probably some female in me somewhere, somehow. 

So I try to tell this to other gay guys when I can: don’t expect the heart attack, if it ever comes, to feel like the one Hollywood tells you, all stabby. It might very well hit you like it does women. My generation of gay men got it drilled into us that our sexual orientation is something we learned by way of abuse, distant father, dominating mother, fear of women, immoral habits. But no…it’s in our biology. There are probably a bunch of other aspects to that besides sex.

This is why I have sought out care from physicians who are familiar with treating gay men. Our bodies may just be ever so slightly different enough, more akin to females, that our healthcare needs are different. It is entirely possible that drugs work on us more like they do women then heterosexual men. And I can tell you from personal experience, that the heart attack comes on the way this ER nurse describes. More than likely other symptoms in us look more like they do in women.

Both my cardiologist and my GP have assured me that this is how another heart attack, if it comes, will present in me. Doctors are notoriously hard boiled about all this.

——-

A nurse has heart attack and describes what women feel when having one:

I am an ER nurse and this is the best description of this event that I have ever heard. Please read, pay attention, and send it on!…

—

FEMALE HEART ATTACKS

I was aware that female heart attacks are different, but this is the best description I’ve ever read.

Women rarely have the same dramatic symptoms that men have … you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor that we see in movies. Here is the story of one woman’s experience with a heart attack.

I had a heart attack at about 10:30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect might have brought it on. I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, ‘A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.

A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you’ve been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you’ve swallowed a golf ball going down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn’t have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation–the only trouble was that I hadn’t taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.

After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasms), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum (breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).

This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. ‘AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening — we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI happening, haven’t we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God, I think I’m having a heart attack!

I lowered the foot rest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn’t be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else… but, on the other hand, if I don’t, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in a moment.

I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics… I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I didn’t feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to un-bolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.

I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don’t remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when we arrived and saw that the radiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like ‘Have you taken any medications?’) but I couldn’t make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and partner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stints to hold open my right coronary artery.

I know it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on restarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.
Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.

1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body, not the usual men’s symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act). It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn’t know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they’ll feel better in the morning when they wake up… which doesn’t happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you’ve not felt before. It is better to have a ‘false alarm’ visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!

2. Note that I said ‘Call the Paramedics.’ And if you can take an aspirin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!

Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER – you are a hazard to others on the road.

Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be speeding and looking anxiously at what’s happening with you instead of the road.

Do NOT call your doctor — he doesn’t know where you live and if it’s at night you won’t reach him anyway, and if it’s daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn’t carry the equipment in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.

3. Don’t assume it couldn’t be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it’s unbelievably high and/or accompanied by high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive.

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this mail sends it to 10 people, you can be sure that we’ll save at least one life.

*Please be a true friend and send this article to all you female friends.

The lab beakers and precision scale for my upcoming project to make H&W Control developer arrived the other day. This is good. They should be precise enough I can compare them to the plastic graduated beakers I’ve been using since I was a teenager and see how much off they’ve been all this time, if any. But these are mostly for the project I have going, to make some H&W Control developer after so many decades without.

I’ve been told the raw chemicals have been shipped finally, and should arrive soon. There is one more item on the list I was advised of on the Facebook darkroom page I wrote about previously, which is a magnetic stirrer with a hot plate for keeping the mix temperature good. That’ll help. My arm got really tired with all that stirring the rapid fix ingredients.

Given the uncertainties in getting my workflow developers and fixers these days, being able to mix up my own from the raw ingredients is a good skill to…er…develop. Although mixing my own HC-110 might be beyond my willingness to risk since the raw ingredients for that developer are Holy Shit toxic. But none of this is a one-shot deal. Certainly if the experiment with H&W Control developer works out. I loved that film. To be able to use it again would be heaven.

I took a stroll over to Service Photo just down the street from me to see if anything has changed since Kodak chemistry became available again. But it hasn’t really. I saw some new bottles of Kodafix which is good, but when I went up to the counter to ask about it I was carefully ignored. The stock of film behind the counter was pitiful. The shelves of second hand film cameras now only had second hand digital cameras. I don’t think they care about film photographers anymore.

I remember being overjoyed to see they’d moved from inside the urban core to just a few blocks from my front door. I think they were the last of the good photography stores between here and DC. I can name them all, including the one I worked for briefly, Industrial Photo in Silver Spring. All gone now. Memories. I have to mail order nearly everything now. But at least I can do that.

Something I am getting really good at in my old age is the ability to flick just one single little pill out of the bottle. I practice mornings and evenings.

I put my troubles to the folks on a film photography forum I follow. I figured many of them would have been working with raw chemistry longer than I’ve been working an SLR camera. Got a lot of advice to raise the temperature of my mix water, but one user said I should check my mix again to see if it was still cloudy. He said he usually lets a mix rest overnight before using it.

That was the right answer. I drew a flask out of the brown bottle I keep my film fixer in and it’s crystal clear now. So now I know. Mix and let rest for a bit.

Also, maybe tweak the temperature up a bit regardless of what the instructions say. I thought it was odd they specified 68 degrees. The recipes for H&W Control developer all want pretty hot water (one says 130 degrees, another 140) to start. Lots of advice on that forum to use a bit hotter water.

Also: Kodak Is Making Chemistry Again After All! They’re restarting their process here in the states and most of it is again available on the B&H website. I can buy Kodak HC-110 again! I’m going to ask Service Photo tomorrow if they’ll start stocking it again soon.

And now…

When posting a question to a social media group for their expertise, always expect an answer to a question you didn’t ask.

Many years ago, when I was but a young man, I attended a talk by Ansel Adams at Georgetown University. That Ansel Adams. He gave a wonderful talk about his approach to photography and how he came to develop the zone system, and I ate up every word because he is a grand master of monochrome photography. After he gave his talk he opened it up for questions from the audience. Bunch of good questions from the students, but sure enough someone stands up with a complex question about which developer was better than another. Adams replied that he knew many photographers had their particular holy waters (his words, and the audience laughed) but (and I’m drawing from memory here) the tools are only a means to an end so don’t focus so much on the tools you lose focus on the end.

Remember when I said the other day that there is religion about hardening fixers? When I posted my question to the darkroom group I said that I was looking for a replacement for Kodak Rapid Fix and that Ilford rapid fix didn’t cut it because it wasn’t a hardening fixer and that is why I eventually went with the product from Photographer’s Formulary. I Knew as I typed that I was going to get a bunch of Why Do You Want A Hardening Fixer responses, despite my question not being about the pros and cons of hardening fixers.

Sure enough.

Bonus points for one commenter saying hardening fixers are only for paper and another saying they are certainly not for paper.

Never mind why. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenage boy, I have a workflow that works for me, and I am not changing it. I’m 70 years old now, and every shot I take is a little more experience under my belt doing the thing I do. I love my tools, my cameras, my workflow. It’s my comfort zone. I’m happy there. Whole. But it’s the photograph that matters. Is it what I meant? Yes? No? Keep working it then.

This morning I mixed the chemicals I got from Photographer’s Formulary I wrote about the other day. I was very careful to follow their instructions on mixing To The Letter. Which was good because lawd have mercy when they said to mix in a Well Ventilated Area because some of it would give off fumes they weren’t frikken kidding!

But I had a difficulty. The powdered chemicals they supplied me with did not dissolve nearly as quickly as the instructions said. At one point the instructions called for patience when adding the boric acid because it would take up to five minutes to dissolve. Try more like 20. All if it was like that except for the liquid ingredients. And I kept stirring the entire time. I used only distilled water, and at 68 degrees as instructed.

What I ended up with was a mixture that never got completely clear. Everything finally seemed to have dissolved but it still has a sight cloudy appearance to it.

So I did some tests with a few small strips of 35mm film I sacrificed for the cause. They seemed to clear just fine but there remained a slightly pinkish tint that should not have been there. That worried me until I realized I was still seeing the anti-halation layer which is normally removed by the developer. Since I was just dipping the film strips into the fixer I wasn’t removing that layer.

For comparison I mixed up my last good bottle of Kodafix that I used for paper processing. The Kodafix working solution I mixed up was pure and clear like water. Those strips came out exactly like the strips I did from the rapid fix I mixed up.

What I mixed is a bit cloudy, but it seems to work. But I would like a second opinion from anyone reading this who is more familiar with mixing and working with raw chemicals than I am. What could have happened here? Why was it taking so much longer than the instructions said to dissolve the chemicals? I mean, several orders of magnitude longer. What could have happened, what could I have possibly done, to leave the mixture a bit cloudy. As I said, I used only distilled water, and I mixed in a clean glass Pyrex dish.

I’ve no idea.

This is not making me feel comfortable about mixing up some H&W Control developer from raw chemicals.

I took a fancy to my cameras a few days ago, went to York to visit some favorite places, finished off a roll of film which give me the urge to start working on the backlog of film in my darkroom waiting to be developed. But it had been a long while since I did any of that and I knew my chemicals were past their expiration date. So I went to my local photography store, only to be told (rather coldly by a young staff member), that Kodak was no longer selling chemistry, and they weren’t interested in ordering the raw chemicals I needed to make H&W Control developer.

(Fuck!) So I began scrambling for any unsold stock, only to find that it was already gone. Now I need an alternative source. Well, long story short I think I’ve found one (two) but it was stressful. I have a black & white workflow that’s worked for me since I was a teenage boy and I really Really didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time and waste a lot of film experimenting to find a new one.

My Go-To developer is HC-110. You make a stock solution from a concentrate and then dilute it further to process film. I used the dilution ‘B’ as a one-shot developer. I have a copy of the Kodak Darkroom Dataguide that had the development time calculator wheel on it instead of the table later editions had. Over those pages I’ve stuck a bunch of Post-It notes with data for Fuji Neopan, 35 and 120, and Agfa Rollei Retro film 35 and 120. I stick a Weston thermometer into the developer, then using the dial I align whatever temperature I see on the thermometer with the number for the film I’m processing and the bottom of the dial gives you the time to develop. Then it’s a brief stop bath, then into a solution of Kodak Rapid Fix. Then wash for thirty minutes.

I found a source for an HC-110 substitute at The Film Photography Project, tried it out on a single roll and that came out to my complete satisfaction. So there’s that. But I still needed a good substitute for Rapid Fix. I took a chance and developed a couple rolls of film using the Kodak product I had which was a year past it’s expiration date, and the result was not wonderful. It worked but I had to fix for twice as long to get the film cleared. So no more of that. I needed fresh.

To that end I ordered some Ilford Rapid Fixer, which came oddly without a top cap (the bottle was sealed). So I made plans to use that, but first I did some research because I wanted to be sure it worked enough like the Kodak product I could just keep to my standard workflow. That’s when I saw it wasn’t a hardening fixer.

There is religion about that. A hardening fixer hardens the emulsion has it removes the unused silver nitrates. You really want to use one of these only on film, it does nothing much for paper. But some people think a hardening fixer is bad for film. Long story short: I don’t. I think it’s Good for film. So now I need to find a hardening fixer that works like Kodak Rapid Fix.

I found a source at the Photographer’s Formulary. They also had and were willing to ship to me (unlike B&H) the raw chemistry to make H&W Control developer (more about that some other time). So I ordered their Rapid Fix with Hardener. Days later they still hadn’t shipped (apparently) so I ordered it again from B&H, which resells chemistry from Photographer’s Formulary (just not all the raw chemicals to make H&W Control developer (later…later…). That came yesterday as I type this.

And it’s…interesting. What I was expecting was the usual two-part concentrate and little bottle of hardener. What I got was…this…

By the way…that’s my basement chest freezer, or as I say when that part of the basement is my darkroom, the table where I put my paper developing trays. Next to it is the dryer which just happens perfectly to be the same height as the freezer, and between them that’s my workspace for doing silver paper enlargements. The enlarger is in the shower stall in the bathroom next to the freezer. When you grew up in a series of small garden apartments you learn how to make every space server multiple purposes. I don’t have enough space in my little Baltimore rowhouse for a dedicated paper darkroom, but I can make that corner of the back basement work as one.

So what I got from Photographer’s Formulary isn’t a hardening rapid fixer, but the raw ingredients for making hardening rapid fixer. All packaged in precisely the right amounts…

…to mix up some hardening rapid fixer if you follow the included directions. I’ve no idea why it comes like this instead of packaged as ready made concentrate, other than maybe with them it’s The Way. But this is good, it gives me some practice for when I get the raw chemistry to make some H&W Control developer.

The end result is you get concentrate and hardener which you then mix together to make a (nearly, they measure in metric) gallon of working solution. I’m going to mix it all up today. I’m told when I add the acetic acid fumes will result, so I’ll mix it up in the kitchen where I can open some windows. Progress report later…

I completely forgot that today is Christmas Eve. I reckon that comes with being solitary and retired.

I could have sworn it was middle of next week. So the plan today was to buy a few groceries this morning and sit back and wait the holiday traffic out. But my street is pretty empty of parked cars and it’s not a workday for most of the folks here I’m sure. Plus, the entire neighborhood actually pretty quiet.

I have this horrible intuition that the main roads and jammed with last minute shoppers, and the stores are being mobbed, and I am not going anywhere until after Christmas.

Spending Christmas as I usually do being a gay guy who has failed miserably at love, and because the family I’m closest to now is on the other coast, by myself. I’ll give myself a nice Christmas dinner at home and try not to drink too much.

I’ve said elsewhere here that I couldn’t make it professionally in the arts because I never had the kind of focus it take. Case in point: just a few days ago I was all about my art gallery, and now it’s pretty much back to the photography.

I have two routes I use for my morning walks, one of which is to zig-zag through the new “luxury” rowhouse development nearby, where the container factory used to be. That development has been a muse ever since they started building it. Today on my morning coffee walk, while going through one of the narrow alleyways between the rows, I saw the sort of slightly cloudy, sun streaked sky overhead I love to work with, and just then it was making that narrow alley look really interesting to my photographic eye.

I had to have that shot. But at that moment all I had was the iPhone. Olay…it can can do a good job with my art photography, I have lots of examples. So I snapped off an iPhone shot just to get it. Then I hightailed it back home and got the Petri out.

I see now I haven’t written about this here, but probably on my Facebook page and I was neglecting this blog. But some time ago I found a Petri FT for sale on one of the used camera sites, that looked to be in very good condition. So I bought it for its nostalgia value to me. The Petri was my first SLR camera, simple and affordable to teenage me, and it opened a new world to me artistically. Now I could precisely compose to the frame in the viewfinder, because now I’m looking through the same lens that will take the photo. It was what you see is what you get, and I could be as specific about composing a shot as I wanted to be. Plus, you could change lenses from wide angle to telephoto, and no matter what lens I had on it I was still seeing exactly when the film saw when the shutter opened. You just don’t get that with any other sort of camera.

When I first got the second hand Petri I ordered I took it to Ocean City New Jersey for an ultimate nostalgia trip. OC became one of my photographic muses back when I was a teenage boy, and it still is. Many of what I consider my best shots from that period were taken with the Petri. Back then I could not afford its native 28mm or 135mm lenses, so those were third party compatibles from Soligor and Vivitar. Now I can, and that is what I shoot with on that camera.

Last summer I took the Petri with me because, perhaps irrationally, I wanted that example of my first SLR camera to see and photograph the land of my birth. I bought it back home to Baltimore still loaded with some Tri-X Pan I’d taken to California with only a couple shots on it. So I had the roll to finish. It still had the 28mm Petri lens on it. I put a red filter on that and gave the camera a fresh battery. Fortune smiled on me and the sky was still pretty interesting when I got back to the rowhouse development and that narrow alleyway, and I finished the roll pretty quickly.

That makes 7 rolls of Tri-X I have waiting for me in the darkroom. I have another partial roll of Tri-X in the Canon F1N that also came back from California. I finish that and it’s an even eight which works out for the four reel tank I have. Still have three rolls of 120 NeoPan 100, three or four of 35mm NeoPan 100 out of the Leica, and five rolls of Agfa Copex to develop when I can mix up some H&W Control developer.

Obviously my inner compass has swung back to the cameras. So it goes…

…even though the old hardware still works just fine.

I’m almost two years retired now, and computers can still take a big bite out of my day. Today’s exercise in spinning my wheels trying to get things work comes courtesy of Apple. No surprise there. It just works…except when it doesn’t.

Apple really Really wants you to keep up to date on not just their software but the hardware it runs on too. And the longer you delay buying their latest and greatest hardware, the more you find that out. And I’m still on some very old Apple hardware, because I need to stay on a very old version of MacOS. And I need to do that, because Adobe makes you rent their software now, instead of offering upgrades. I use the Macs almost exclusively in the art room for my photography and scanned in artwork from the drafting table, and I won’t rent their software for the same reason I don’t rent my brushes, pens, charcoal sticks and the drafting table.

And especially after Adobe screwed me out of 850 for the Windows version of Photoshop that I had, and was able to use for just over two years until Adobe decided the license I had was incorrect and they remote controlled shut it off.

So I’m stuck, but slowly getting unstuck. GIMP does everything I need that Photoshop did for me. The only stickler is Lightroom, but I’m almost free of that too.

In the meantime, if you have an iPhone and you’ve been keeping up to date with the OS upgrades and security patches on that, and you have an older Mac, you are getting more and more distant from any version of iTunes you are running to sync your iPhone with. Especially your music library.

A few days ago I ordered a CD of the Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack to Logan’s Run. I have had the LP version for decades, but only realized I never got a digital version when I wanted to listen to it on the iPod and it wasn’t there. So that CD came in the mail and I put it into the art room Mac, which also holds my iTunes library, and copied it over so I could put it on the iPhone, and the iPod Classic.

No sweat right? I’ve done this hundreds of times before. Then I found the soundtrack to the new Percy Jackson TV series and bought that off the iTunes store since it isn’t currently available on CD. Now I have two albums to copy over to the iPhone and iPod.

The Percy Jackson one actually downloaded to the iPhone as well as my iTunes library. Fine. I plug the iPod into the Mac and it syncs both albums no trouble. Bear in mind this is a Much older piece of Apple hardware than the iPhone I currently have. Then I try to sync the iPhone and that’s where the trouble began.

I plug the iPhone into the Mac, and iTunes says it needs a software update before it will connect to my iPhone. Fine. I’ve seen this before, after every security patch. Apple still supports my older hardware and the older version of MacOS it’s running with security patches. But now I experience a new problem; an error message saying it cannot download the iTunes update.

So I go looking around the net and lo and behold lots of people are complaining about this happening after the most recent iOS updates. And the thing of that is Apple says it should all be compatible with the older versions of iTunes. So their solutions are to either reinstall iTunes…except the version of iTunes you need for the older MacOS isn’t available anymore, even though it’s allegedly still compatible with the current version of iOS…or reinstall the operating system. Because you really wanted to spend an entire day installing MacOS and all your apps and configurations just to copy over some music to your iPhone.

I spent an entire morning today trying this and trying that to no avail, and swearing loudly that I would never put another update on any of my Apple devices ever again. You cannot downgrade iOS…that’s Apple’s policy. Now it seems, I cannot sync my iPhone with iTunes anymore, which means I can’t back it up, in addition to not being able to sync my music library.

Eventually among the wail of pain out there I see a link to a third party program that claims to run on my Mac Pro version of MacOS, and connects to my iPhone to allow backing up, file copy and music copy from the iTunes library. So I download a copy and give it a try. There was trial version functionality which allowed me to prove it did what I needed and I finally got my music copied over. Then I bought a license for it. It wasn’t expensive and it wasn’t subscription only.

This is it. It’s called iMazing and I can verify that it works…at least on my 2010 Mac Pro and iPhone Xs running iOS 17. So now I can make backups of the iPhone and copy music files over. It isn’t automatic synchronization but I can deal with it. They say it will also let you move your music and other files to an iPod Classic, which gives me some security there because I still like that little dedicated music player.

So that was my morning today. How was yours?

I see a hit from Nigeria in my website server logs today. Hopefully it’s that Nigerian prince that wants to leave me money and he’s finally found me.

Hahahahaha…no. More likely it’s Nigerian authorities looking for gay websites to block.