Near-midterm Interlude

So there's not a lot of news to report today. The term's going on the way terms do. The weather is doing what the weather does, and I'm behind the way I often am. It's far too cloudy here to see the eclipse, and that rots. Probably I should be thankful since I've been battling a slight cold since my visit to Beantown.

But the big joy is that I finally broke down and took the film from my trip to Paris in. I'd been putting it off because I'd had camera problems while I was there and my French wasn't good enough to convince the officials at the airport to not pass it through the X-ray machine. But I broke down - I deserved a treat (as if ducking off to Boston wasn't one). And the pictures came out nicely, I think.

Now the photos cost me more to develop than I'd like. And that leaves payday a long way off. I wish I had access to a darkroom so I could do these things myself, but evidently they're going well and truly out of style. That's one of the great tragedies of life, I think. I always enjoyed darkroom time - there was something truly meditative about it to me. There were more than a few days where the difficulties of my undergrad were made more sensible by a little time playing with pictures.

One of the things I found myself thinking about as I was choosing a few images to put up is how funny it is that even though I've some of these same photos on my digital camera, I feel so much better actually having them on film. And trotting around a foreign city without my full camera bag felt very strange, too (I only carried the then-newly acquired digital and one of my camera bodies).

I still like the old SLR better, frankly. And I wonder how long it'll be until people begin to seriously fear what's happened as we've moved images and words ever closer to digital only storage.

And so, rather than talk about candidates or rail on about the injustices of my life, I thought I'd put a couple of photos up. Besides, honestly, this blog needed a few images just to keep things interesting. And it never hurts to stop and think about nice things for a bit of time.

So I hope you enjoy 'em. The top image is from a piece in the Louvre; the second is a seal on the side of Sacre Couer, and the last is inside the Musee D'Orsay. There's more, and maybe I'll put some up. But right now, I'm trying to get it together to actually do some grading tonight and maybe actually think about how to plot out next week's lectures.