Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A week ago, two guys were up on my roof with rolls of roofing paper and cans of tar.

Right now it's raining buckets in Baltimore, very noisily on that roof.

It's a real relief to be looking at dry ceilings and floors upstairs instead of trying to guess how often I need to check the placement of the buckets. Much nicer than the last several rains.

In other news, I've got a new expensive time-sink. Until the owner needs it back, I've got use of a folding 4x5 camera. I get to learn how to use tilts and shifts. Now I already know how I feel about "big" negatives (and even better, slides) from anniemal's 1939 box camera, which is medium format, so I'm looking forward to seeing a four-inch by five-inch (approx. 10cm by 12.5cm) piece of exposed film. And I've got control over the shutter speed and aperture, unlike the box. (OTOH, I can reasonably use the box camera without a tripod and a black cloth to put over my head. (And if I want an assortment of different focal lengths and a built-in meter, I haven't lost my enthusiasm for 35mm.))

I've wanted to try large format -- 4x5 or 8x10 -- for a while now, but didn't expect to get a chance for a long time. This is gonna be fun. I wonder how long it'll take me to get used to loading the film holders. (The other challenge will be paying for developing ... or for chemicals if somebody lends me developing trays. But worst-case, I empty the pouch of quarters I hang on my belt when I'm in garb.) I think I know what I want the first photo I take with this camera to be, if Perrine will be patient enough for me to set up the shot when the light is right. Boy, do I need to find a way to make money with large-format, to come up with both the money to pay for it and the excuse for spending that money on it.

Basically, this is going to be fun. The money angle just determines how much fun. Now I get to learn how to make the camere movements useful. I've got a smidgen of theory, but I never expected the application to really click for me until I had a chance to spend a lot of time fiddling with the camera while staring at the ground glass. Now I have my chance. Now I can find out what folks were talking about when they told me tilt could help me with a tricky macro shot I've wanted to do.

Finally, I have no clue how I'm getting to either of my rehearsals this week. Wheee.

I am rather tired, but my brain keeps shouting, "Look! A 4x5 camera!" and waking me up.

"You should live your life in such a way that the preacher doesn't have to tell any lies at your funeral" (Anyone know who gets credit for this saying?)

And to my Muslim friends: may God give you blessed month. (I'll admit to still being slightly confused as to whether Ramadan started today or yesterday.)

Quick clips of my day because I'm feeling too scattered to tackle larger stuff I've been wanting to write...

For some reason my internal clock got a day off. Late last night I started thinking it was Monday night, and this morning I had to remind myself over and over that it was not yet Tuesday. I'm not sure why.

It continues to rain heavily on Baltimore.

This morning while I was in the blue bedroom, I heard the unmistakable sound of Perrine dealing with a hairball in the hallway. (I've lived with enough other people's cats over the years to know that sound!) I dashed out and tried to get a paper towel in front of her (why is it that cats always resist any attempts to get newspapers, paper bags, towels, etc. between their faces and the floor when they're about to do the icky thing?), but fortunately she stopped making the sound or exhibiting any other signs after a couple minutes without anything having come up. This is about the third time she's done this. I'm not sure what to make of it. (But I'm glad to not have had to clean up a hairball yet.)

A couple of weeks ago, Perrine discovered the fascination of flush toilets. She seems a lot less interested in the flush than in the way the bowl refills afterwards. She's really cute peering into the bowl. Trying to judge her expressions and body language when she watches me, I think she's figured out that the toilet is a self-emptying litter box for humans; I'm wondering whether she considers that a good thing. (I'm still considering trying to teach her to use the toilet.) She notices running water in the sink, but there she's more interested in the drain, I think ... she's not as fascinated by the tap as she is by the toilet, and sometimes ignores it completely. (I've known a couple cats who could be entertained for forty minutes or longer at a stretch by turning on the faucet and letting them bat a the column of water falling in the sink.) She does seem to think that water sitting in dirty dishes in the kitchen sing tastes better than the stuff in her water dish. And though I haven't seen her drink from the upstairs toilet, I just spotted her doing so from the almost-never-used toilet in the basement. (Seldom used, but the bowl is still pretty yucky.)

(Normally I'm of the "cats don't belong on countertops" camp, but since that's where the mice usually are...)

This morning as I was checking my mail in the blue room, someone was showing bats on television as part of the Hallowe'en theme. Except that every time they showed a close-up of a bad, all I could think was, "Oh, how adorable!" Usually the only bats I see close up are moving very, very quickly in the dark. You don't get much detail at a meter away at what seems to be about forty miles per hour in the dark. (Yes, I realize I just mixed mks and ft/lb/s units in one sentence ... and I have no idea what the actual speed of local (I'm including all of PA and MD in my concept of "local" here) insectovore bats is.) Usually I'm seeing them from a lot further away, so they're just airborne parentheses and curlybraces flickering into and out of existence in the twilight, or further still so that they're vaguely bird-shaped silhouettes against the dusk sky, distinguishable as bats only by the way they move.

I didn't realize how tiny vampire bats are. I think the mice in my kitchen are larger. Of course bats look larger in flight 'cause of that wingspan. (The vampire bat on the telly looked to be only slightly smaller than the northeast-US (insect eating) example. Both of the fruit bats they showed -- neither of which lives anywhere near here -- were significantly larger. The largest they showed -- I think they said it was the largest species of bat, and I don't think it was North American -- made me wonder how much fruit it has to eat every night to get enough energy to fly that big body around.

I wonder whether I'd recognize a fruit bat in the wild, since I usually recognize bats by their motion, and that's mostly determined by their prey. (Yes, the actual motion of straight-flight is slightly different than for birds, as well, so maybe I would, if I were paying attention ... I don't think I've confused any swallows for bats, and they do the rapid direction change thing too.)

Someday ... someday I'm going to get that bat photo I want. Looking straight up at the belly of a bat flying overhead, with a long lens and a [expletive]ing huge flash, with black sky behind it. I want to see the colour and texture of its fur, and I want it to be unquestionably a "bat right overhead in the dark" shot.

I want the rain to stop so I can go play with the 4x5 camera and tall buildings. (I figure I'll learn the easiest-to-understand movements first.)