Okay, I haven't updated in quite a while and I think it's time I ditch the video posts, at least for now, and write seriously about what's been going on in my life over the winter. It has been one big long emotional stress ball, but things are looking up.

If one thing has been ever-present in my life this winter, death has been it. Last fall, an old friend of Danny's passed away, and we drove to Montgomery, AL, to attend the funeral. It was held in a modernistic but ugly church, with bad music, and I felt rather out of place. Other than having a weekend away with Danny, I enjoyed nothing about being there.

I ended up not having the jaw surgery that was scheduled for December. I have a birth defect, hemifacial microsomia, that amounts to prenatal underdevelopment of one side of the face. Mine is relatively mild as far as that defect goes and could have been much worse, but it's always been a problem for me. A few years ago I started taking care of my neglected teeth and the oral surgeon who removed my wisdom teeth started me on the track to getting orthodontic braces and had an eye on doing surgery to fix my slightly malformed right jaw. In doing the needed measurements for the surgery, he found that the kind of surgery he wanted to do to straighten out my bite was not possible, and the only surgery that would actually have a chance of helping would be an extensive procedure, an overhaul of my jaw. However, the extensive surgery would risk making my jaw non-functional, so it was a basically all or nothing proposition. We ultimately decided that at my age it would be best to leave well enough alone and not do any surgery. I must admit I was excited about having the surgery, but not looking forward to the lengthy recovery or facing the risks. In my view, it was bittersweet. At present, my orthodontist is doing some final tweaking of my braces to maximize some things non-surgically, and I'm nearly done.

After the death of his Danny's friend, both of us started pondering our own mortality and in February Danny made an appointment for us to visit a local funeral home to start making our final arrangements. It is something he'd always meant to do, but his friend's passing away had spurred him to act. In the meantime, though, we got the sudden news in our dear friend and club brother, J., whom we had only known a couple of years, committed suicide. He had attempted it last year, and at the time that put us through the wringer emotionally, but this devastated us. He left no note and no explanation, but from piecing together clues from his other friends it seems he'd had a history of depression; in the past few years he'd had some minor health issues that may have negatively affected his finances; and the week before, after more than a year of stressing about it, he'd officially lost his job. He was an incredibly sweet and loving man, but he was an exceedingly private person. Most of his family lives in a state far away and other than getting his body and arranging for his car, they had little interest in taking over the dissemination of his belongings, so that task has fallen to his closest confidant. We're sorry she was saddled with the responsibility, but we were able to take some of his things, including his club colors. He had also enormously helped our roommate John to get his small business, John's Pantry, off the ground in its first few months, so two baker's racks from J.'s kitchen are now there. And I'm glad that a few plants that J. had given us -- some rainlilies (Zephyranthes) and a red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) -- are growing well and getting ready to bloom. It's a damn shame J. chose to end his life in the dreariest days of winter, because everyone's mood seems to lift in these beautiful days of spring when in our part of the world everything is growing and Nature is blushing into joyful color. Getting those few things of J.'s from his house, and the beauty of springtime and Easter, have been invaluable for us in helping us to turn the page and close the book on grieving over him.

Ultimately, as difficult as it was, Danny and I kept our appointment and made our arrangements. Doing it while still raw from J.'s death ironically made the process easier; I think we were just that much more numb from it all. As morbid as it seems, it's a comforting thought that Danny and I will be together when our lives are over. And a neat thing about it is that we'll be buried together (double deep in the same plot) in a new, military-only section of the cemetery. That's progress in action, folks.

My photographic mojo has suffered from all this, but I've been using the opportunity to sharpen my darkroom printing skills and round out my kit. I had thought about modestly celebrating the end of my term in braces by buying myself either a Leica rangefinder (the Rolls Royce of cameras), or, more reasonably, a "clone": one of the non-Leica cameras that conform to the Leica specifications and take the same lenses, not notably by fellow German company Voigtländer, or by any one of the few camera companies in the former Soviet Union. Completely by chance, I got a fantastic deal on one of the latter, a FED-2b, with two lenses included. I think I've got a pinhole light leak in one of the shutter curtains, but it's not serious and I'm trying to track it down. Fantastic camera otherwise and it satisfies my "I deserve a Leica" hankering. Danny usually opposes my gear geekery, but he actually spurred me on recently to buy a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, a Bakelite pseudo-TLR box camera from the 1950s. Very cute! With spring and more sunlight returning, I think I'm getting some of that mojo back, and feeling better. I'm already working on setting up an online shop to offer some of my handmade silver halide photographs for sale.

One more thing I'll be doing as soon as my braces come off is getting a tattoo. Our deceased friend J. had thoughtfully commissioned a local tattoo artist to draw up a design for me, based on my idea: a tattoo of St. Michael the Archangel, as depicted by Sir Jacob Epstein's bronze sculpture at Coventry Cathedral, symbolizing my personal victory over the "demons" of insecurity, low self-esteem, and dysfunction due to my birth defect. It will be on the outside of my left shin, mostly in monochrome, with some color highlighting.

At the urging of a friend, this week I'll be seeing a dermatologist to see about getting a large, bumpy mole removed that I have near my left ear. Maybe he can remove a couple of prominent smaller ones from my back, too. It makes no sense for an ugly mole to spoil what would otherwise be my faaaaaabulous new looks when the braces are done! ;-)

Since I've turned 40 last fall, I seem to have settled into what may be my mode of thinking for this decade: working on putting my impulsive younger days behind me, and slowly getting my life affairs settled in preparation for my more mature years.

I really don't know where to start.

Back in late August, we took our usual pilgrimage up to eastern Wisconsin for the Argonauts/Castaways joint run. Photographically, I had two primary goals: to shoot more film than I ever had, and to wean myself more off 35mm and onto medium and large formats. I succeeded on both counts. When we returned home, I discovered I had about fifteen rolls of film and about fifteen sheets of film to be processed, most of them in color! It took me about a week to do it all and then even longer to do the editing and retouching. You can see my Wisconsin set here. However, I did not get to do any private sessions with anyone like I'd hoped, just a few little mini-sessions out in the daylight here and there. The run is challenging to shoot because the outside is so bright and then the inside of the barn where everything is held is so dim: easily five or six stops' difference, with little transition.

I used mostly just one camera of each format, medium excepted:
Small: Nikon F4
Medium: Mamiya 645 Pro; Holga 120N
Large: Graflex Crown Graphic (4x5)

On the way back home, we stopped by the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc, simply the most uninteresting (to me) museum I've ever been to. The only partially redeeming aspect was the submarine tour, and I could have kicked myself for not bringing my digital camera on board to better capture the industrial textures within. (The film camera I had on my person then was loaded with an unsuitable ISO.)

After the trip and all the developing I had to do, I took a bit of a break from shooting. I was so burnt out it wasn't funny, and other pressures have been getting to me as well. Things are getting better now and I've tried to resume taking photographs, but I just haven't been anywhere interesting lately. I've got a roll of 120 pending in my Holga 120N and as soon as I finish it, I'll be trying out a new developer: Kodak XTOL, a fine-grain, vitamin C based developer which can be replenished instead of used one-shot. Shortly before the trip to Wisconsin I did get my darkroom finished and dipped my toe into doing printing, though at the time the summer heat and the lack of air conditioning in the crazy cat lady house made spending any time there intolerable. I need to get back in there and do some printing work.

My braces are still coming along well. Finally last week I heard back from my insurance company about my upcoming surgery. December 1 has been set as the date for my orthognathic surgery. Late next week I have an appointment with my oral-maxillofacial surgeon to discuss all the details with me. From what I've read online, I'll be away from work for roughly three weeks while my mouth is wired shut and I go on a liquid diet. Immediate recovery extends to about six weeks, at which time I'll gradually gain the ability to chew again. Less than a year later my braces should be off and I'll be good as new, with my face corrected at last. This will be the roughest thing I've ever been through in my life, but it'll also be the most transforming. I'm simultaneously scared and excited.

I haven't posted here since the end of April? Oh my ears and whiskers!  I've meant to post more frequently, but life happens.  If you don't like it you can kiss my ass.

Anyway, my health has been great. I've been dutifully taking my supplements and lemonade to get my citrate level up for my follow-up appointment with my urologist later this month. I've also discovered that since I started taking high blood pressure meds a few months ago, I've not had a single migraine! Now that's an unexpected plus. I'm suffering no virility-related side effects either. Cutting my risk of heart attack and eliminating my migraines at the same time with no side effects; and being generic, it doesn't cost a fortune? That's definitely worth that one tiny white pill every night.

I'm also still doing well with my braces. One really doesn't notice much of a change from month to month, but those of you who've known me in person and seen how terrible my teeth were before are in for a surprise. I'm at the point now where my oral-maxillofacial surgeon is drawing up plans for my upcoming jaw surgery to fix my birth defect. I'm going to recommend that he not do anything really dramatic, since my jaw functions well as it is with no TMJ issues, and at my age there's no real need for drastic measures. We'll see.

I just sold off some stock from my company stock purchase plan that paid off the smaller medical bills related to this kidney stone episode, and I've paid off my braces, so I'm getting financially healthy again... until the jaw surgery, of course.

In my photography pursuits, I've been slow this year to be ambitious. Memphis' springs are nearly non-existent, and wet: by the time of the last frost date in mid-April, it has begun to rain, and the rain essentially doesn't stop for a month. By the time it does, the temperatures start to get into the mid-90s. None of that is good photography weather! We're going to Wisconsin next month on our annual trek up to the Argonauts-Castaways joint run, so I'll be shooting a lot more then, and I'm deliberately taking my Graflex Crown Graphic so I can do more 4x5" large-format landscape photography, in both black-and-white and color. One develops color film by a process called C-41 (just look on any roll of color negative film). The chemistry I'd previously been using comes in a ready-made dry powder kit that involves three chemicals, so you have to mix it all up at the same time. The problem is that once mixed, this chemistry only has a limited shelf life, and the kit uses three chemicals while the official C-41 spec calls for four - the powder kits blend the two middle chemicals into one, which may not give archival-quality results. So now I've switched to a liquid concentrate kit that does conform to the C-41 spec, so now I can simply mix up smaller batch if I don't need large quantities, use it until it gets old or exhausts from use, and the unmixed concentrate has an indefinite shelf life. Yay!

I'm also at the point now that I'm going to learn to print. In film photography, exposing and developing film makes a negative. To make a positive, one loads the negative into a photographic enlarger, and projects a focused beam of light down through it onto a sheet of light-sensitive silver-coated paper. Develop the paper just like film, and voilà: a photographic print! Enlargers are horrendously expensive if bought new, but people who are switching over to digital are dumping their enlargers for next to nothing. Recently I've acquired two of them (an Omega D2 and a Beseler 45MCRX), so all I need now is some lesser accessories for them (negative carriers, lensboards, lenses, safelights) and the means to block the light out of a room in the crazy cat lady house across the street that I'll be using for a darkroom. I'm getting excited. I've actually slowed down on my camera addiction!

I haven't completely abandoned digital; I just use it for when I need to land the shot, and I'm using film for all my personal creative pursuits. Last month a local photographer invited me to second-shoot a wedding, and I had a blast. It was like photographer boot camp: having to interact with subjects, arranging people, gauging the light, using the best lens for the task, judicious use of flash, getting the shot while trying to not detract from the ceremony... by the time it was over I was absolutely pooped, but satisfied with my work. You can see a slide show I put together from my wedding shots by clicking here.

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.