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ugh
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Feb. 9th, 2023 @ 09:37 am
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So last time I posted I was like "wow I lost my password"
I also mentioned "so I have a concussion"
GUESS WHO HAD NO IDEA WHAT SHE CHANGED HER PASSWORD TO AND JUST HAD TO CHANGE IT AGAIN
Concussion recovery continues. I'm seeing the guy. It's currently bad again because the weekend was too draining for my bruised brain - five hour drives each way to go to a funeral, crying for four hours straight, that kinda thing, very hard on brains.
I have a vague recollection that I used to want to use this journal more just so, like, I'd forget things less? But the last few years have been hard. I don't know. I think I've been running from the self-reflection involved, also every time I go to my reading page I'm horribly confused because people are casually referring to things I now don't know about and then I feel terrible and overwhelmed.
Right now I am still being an asshole who isn't reading my reading page because, as mentioned, concussion, I have a lot of trouble with reading things.
Anyway, in re: not wanting to forget things:
I noticed L (age 3 and a half) kept looking at me during the funeral. Afterwards, his mother told me that he could see I was crying and kept wanting to bring me tissues, but she didn't let him because she knew if she let go of him she'd have to chase him to stop him just running around in a way that would be quite inappropriate at his grandfather's funeral.
I still think that was just so sweet, though.
Later that evening we all went to have fish and chips at Emu Point and I was feeling a bit rubbish (the wake got very loud and my brain kinda shut down, concussion sucks) so I lay down on J&T's tarp blanket thing and L hurled himself onto my tummy, oof. (His dad called him back after he ran off again immediately so he could apologise, while his aghast mother checked I was okay and was like "if it makes you feel better he only does that with people he really likes and feels comfortable with! We're so sorry!" Apparently he usually only does it with them and she had not anticipated it at all and I have never seen someone radiate so much I know you had surgery not that long ago I really hope you're better oh my god did my son just kill you energy.)
I am not upset and L is still one of my favourite humans in the world, I adore him so much. He's just such a delight.
I also met ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya's brother's kids for the first time in their lives and they're great. Also got to hang out with her brother himself - we've met before a few times but hadn't really had a chance to hang out, that was nice.
One of C's brothers sang a song at the funeral and it was so affecting I currently can't listen to songs that have vaguely similar themes without crying.
I took this picture that evening:
Description: Foreground: white beach sand and some long grasses. Beyond water of a bay, and beyond that hills below a near-sunset sky, the almost-full moon visible.
(I had to edit this post because I'd left the image way too big.)Current Mood:  listless
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velithya and I both got sick the day after we came home from Kalbarri.
It could have been worse: It could have been the day before, or we could have both come down with it on the Tuesday, and been nastily sick on Wednesday, the day we had to drive 600km to get home.
As it was, we didn't, and so we came home via Hutt River Province and the Pinnacles in a non-sick fashion. I was still quite exhausted, mind you, because on Tuesday we walked to Nature's Window and back. It's only about a half-kilometre walk each way, but some of it is quite steep paths, and some of it, well.
This is a picture of part of the last section of the trail:
If you look at that jumbled pile of rock and want to know where the trail is, no, that is the trail. There is a certain amount of clambering up and down the rocks involved. There are a couple of places where you can avoid a little bit of climbing if you go along the edge of the cliff, but... that is the trail you have.
And just to show off the ugly-beautiful majesty of the western coastline, a shot from our stop at Pot Alley, outside Kalbarri:
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So, I went back to my camera shop with my tripod in hand.
"I have a problem," I said. "The head of my tripod won't stay on."
"Won't stay on? Hm." The camera shop guy looked at the camera shop woman. "Maybe it needs to be screwed on?" he mused, unzipping its carry bag.
Taking it by the legs, he pulled it out of the bag.
Clunk.
The head fell off, leaving its inner bits exposed.
There was a pause.
"No," the camera guy said. "It's not supposed to do that."
So, he took it into the back and brought out a new one; the borked one will be returned to the manufacturers.
When I got home, Dean said that while she was pleased the people at my camera shop were replacing my stuff so readily when it was borked, she was concerned that they'd had to replace everything. I hastily explained that they've only replaced two things, one of those things being a $30 filter that was in fact perfectly functional, just not actually perfect, and the other being the tripod, which was broken in a way that they'd never even seen before. I wouldn't even have bothered to get the filter replaced had I not been at the shop anyway, for unrelated reasons, and thought to pull it out and show it to them.
And they remain really nice and helpful, and I like their service. In addition to my own experiences, I've overheard things like:
- A customer calling about buying a $2,000 accessory for his camera, to which one of the camera guys, asked by the person who took the call for his input, said: "It's not worth the money."
- A customer calling, and being told by the person taking the call: "No, if you're on your way and we know you're coming, we'll wait for you." This was today - they were about half an hour from closing time, but a young woman had called in desperate, urgent need of film, so the woman at the shop assured her that they would stay open past closing to sell her film. (The shop woman suspected she has an assignment she's left to the last minute.)
Me, I'm going to stay digital for my camera work until further notice, because not having to mess with film is really really nice. I can't see myself using film again unless I become a professional photographer AND can set up my own darkroom.
And even then... digital is better for some things. For example, last night I was working on an ISO speed of 3200, which is *really damn fast*. ISO 3200 is the highest my camera can go (it can fake it higher, but noise issues get serious). This is also the highest speed that you can get in film - except using it on my digital camera is trivial, and ISO 3200 is a nightmare to process.
You can't use a safelight in your darkroom - you have to handle it in TOTAL darkness. Afterglow from fluourescent lights or timer displays will fog the film. If you're taking it through an airport, say, you can't let it go through the X-ray machines. You have to keep it chilled when it's not in your camera. And getting decent pictures in lighting conditions that need ISO 3200 is already tricky.
Digital is my friend. I take pictures in low light, and it works fine. There is some ISO noise - I suspect less than film would produce - but it's auto-corrected by the camera, and if you're scaling down the images at all (which you pretty much have to, with images from a 15.1MP camera) then the slight loss of sharpness this causes becomes undetectable. And that's without taking advantage of all the post-processing you can do with image editing software.
tl;dr: I love my camera.
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