cancelled by fog

Wednesday. I had to go back to Futureshop to return my ink cartridge because it was effed up. I don’t normally like to return/exchange things. I always get the feeling that I’m doing something illegal or trying to scam the store and the store clerk usually treats me that way. Store clerk was all “you can’t return something once it’s been opened.” I had to explain “but it’s a defective ink cartridge” and showed her the crimp in the little etched plastic/wire thingy. She was skeptical but finally told me to go get another one. No thank you please have a nice day.

After that I went to Black’s to pick up the first batch of my sea kayak photos. Store clerk convinced me to buy a $20 discount card that gives me 25% off all photo finishing for a year. I need to spend money to save money? That there is a good scam but I fell for it. So from now on I have to bring my film to Black’s. In one batch/roll there was a missing photo and another photo has a big brown blob on it. So I have to go back to Black’s and get that fixed up.

Wednesday night I was looking forward to my hot air balloon ride the next morning. Normally you’re supposed to call the flight schedule hotline at 11:00PM to find out about next morning flights. The hotline said to call back at 4:15AM because the weather was unpredictable. 4:15AM came and the flight was cancelled due to fog. Okay that was a major letdown because I don’t drag my ass out of bed that early unless something exciting is happening. Cancelled hot air balloon ride is not exciting. It’s rescheduled for next Saturday.

I had taken Thursday off so I went back to sleep till around 9:30AM and then decided to go for a haircut. They raised their price so now it’s $16 for a cut and a $3 tip. I got home by 11:00AM and, seeing as no one was home, watched some computer porn with the sound cranked up. Then I went to wash the hair out of my hair, slapped on some gel and headed downtown. Traffic is crazy in Toronto. Even at noon there are traffic jams on the highway. I got down 30 minutes early for my 1:00PM darkroom and paid $8 for parking. Good thing I was early because I kinda got lost walking to West Camera; I went west when I should have gone east. Okay this is only the third time I’ve been there, and first time by myself.

Luckily I was the only one in the darkroom because I had to get re-acquainted with all the darkroom equipment and, after all the cursing, by the time I was setup and ready to start making prints it was almost 2:00PM. That was around the time when a pretty cute chick came in. Yes, okay, so I was a little bit of a creep checking out the cute chick in the dim, amber lit darkroom. But there’s not much to do when you’re waiting for your print to go through the machine. It would have been even creepier if I had tried to pick her up but of course I’m not like that. No in fact she was the one giving ME the eye. Yeah that’s it. And her photos weren’t all that great either. Anyway, I ended up spending four hours in the darkroom. West Camera counted it as four and a quarter and I ended up paying $49. AF1 had dinner plans so I headed back to the burbs and still had to go to Henry’s to pick up my other batch of sea kayak film.

It’s great that there’s a Henry’s in the burbs and even though the store carries most things, it doesn’t carry everything. I was looking for the 32 oz. D-76 instead of the 128 oz. D-76 because I don’t want to end up with 4 liters of developer. They only had the 128 oz. at this store. I wanted to buy some Kodak Plus X 125 and Ilford Delta 400 film but they ran out of the Kodak and only had one roll of the Ilford. So I said screw all that and just picked up my photos and some protective sleeves for my 8.5 x 11 prints. That was another $78. This photography thing is costing way too much.

Some of the photos from sea kayaking came back okay; at least good enough to document my trip. From now on when I shoot color scenery I'm sticking with Agfa Optima II 200 or Fuji Reala 100. Even with my crappy abilities the photos came back looking pretty nice...at least the color and contrast anyway. I still need to work on my composition and I’m still not sold on Kodak Portra 400UC.

As punishment for spending so much money yesterday, I went home for lunch today. There were no leftovers so I ended up having an instant noodle and a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios.