Homes.

Allow me to present you a picture of a volkswagen combi (taken from this site):

The "newly" replaced roof in our bedroom was leaking--again, and there's a new rat hole in the kitchen ceiling, just right where the light bulb is fixed; now only one of the two screws is actually attached to the ceiling. suffice to say, our kitchen ceiling spells tragedy.

so i asked keith if he could picture us living in a pigeon hole of a house. and he said, "Well, of course we can." He's lived in so many pigeon holes in his life, one more won't make a difference. I suppose the question is more appropriately asked to me.
"If it's just 'us', we surely can."
I made a face and said that it will never be just 'us' because it is just 'us' who thinks 'us' is just 'us' when it fact 'us' is my my father, my sister, my brother, my mother and her 10,000 sacks of merchandise stored in wherever 'us" is.
"Well, that'd surely be beyond the pigeon hole's capacity," he said.

"I know." I will forever be tragically saddened by this fact, not until we're left to just 'us.'
Sadder, even, because we will forever be stuck in rental house being unable to afford lump sum downpayments for a new house (like what, a quarter of a million? i don't have that kind of money). Saddest at the most for the landlord's lack of regard for the fact that his shithole units for rent are more expensive than the average apartments in the city.

we have been here 6 years. above everything, it's 'just us' moving to a place we can actually own is all i wanted.

"Or we can just live in the combi. We can buy a combi and just sleep in the van."
"and so we can give up our room for the kids to use..."
"...and we can just live in the van..."
"...by the road, in front of our pigeon hole..."
"...that way all of 'us' would fit in our..."
"...pigeon hole."
"Won't that be really cool?"
"Will they ever move out and leave us alone?"

I don't know. i don't know, man. i've given up trying to make them, my mother, especially, understand that...
"...but they will when they retire. my siblings will, when they get have their own kids."

but will that ever come? when will that be, combi?

pet peeves:

people on facebook who love to put (at least) three (3!!) long paragraphs of messages in their status. i'm not sure what they're trying to drive at, but what i am sure of is that they want to exude the idea that they are so opinionated and that they are very learned.
But if they are so smart, they should know better. They would better off starting a blog than posting long status messages. Blogging is still the best way to get one's advocacy straight that posting them as status messages where it gets forgotten and gets thrown aside by other more catchy status messages.
(They can't, they won't start a blog because their writing skills cannot go beyond writing lengthy status messages. which is so tragic.)

so Keith said that is why Twitter is much better choice because it only allows, what, 140 characters? but then you can be overwhelmed by a million hashtags. (however, i'm like a superfan of "Jesus M. Christ" and the "What the Fuck Facts" on twitter. i read them from somebody else's account. like keith's for example.)

same with instagram. fucking hashtag. it does not even have a phonetic equivalent.

Rules and Instructions.

i bought these beauties in Digby, Nova Scotia when i visited last June.
i saved up all my money thinking i'd be able to get a wide-angle lens for my husband's minolta (only to die of heart-attack from the quoted $325-dollar price of the 24mm minolta wide-angle at Downtown Camera). I gave up when i left Toronto for Halifax and focused on splurging at the mountain equipment coop instead.

but if it something is meant to be it will be meant to be and indeed the camera presented itself to me. Arriving in Digby, we were treated to lunch to Mariner's restaurant which is just beside a vintage camera store--possibly the only camera store in downtown Digby. The moment i saw the minolta log i already knew the store's a goldmine.

Hurrying form one appointment to the other, i didn;t have time to check out the store ASAP and when i finally had the chance, i was 2 blocks away and had 30 minutes to spare. i ran like hell, missing my lunch and burning my lungs in the cold, dry Digby air. There, i found an olympus om2 (with normal lens (50mm) and a macro) and a yashica t4 (Mark, the owner of the camera shop said it was a $400.00 camera when it first came out) for my 5 year-old son, all for $30.00. Olympus OM2 with everything on it cost me $20 and the yashica cost me $10--that's including the 15% tax.

I could have gotten a pentax (with 50mm lens) with it but when i was about to pay for it, the shutter locked and Mark didn't really feel like giving me a bad merchandise. He knew it would cost me a lot of money to have it repaired, maybe more than what i paid for purchase. If I told him i would buy it for collection's sake but with only 10 minutes to spare, i forgot all about it. Also, i was thinking of how small my luggage was and how heavy bringing two cameras in my handcarry baggage would be.

The OM2 survived the 24 hour travel time, 4 flight transfers and changes in temperature/humidity. I didn't touch it for a month.


and when I did, it was for a funeral.
My husband's grandmother living in Guimaras died. The OM2 was my camera of choice to bring over the island because:
1. it is smaller than my sr-t, more "girlish"
2. it is easier to hide (good for people like me who love taking pictures but don't wanna be seen with a camera strapped to their necks)
3. it is light weight
4. it is not heavy
5. weighs like a feather compared to my sr-t.
5. did i already say it is lighter?

But my minolta is one jealous girl. She was just too great for anything; she was beyond compare. The fact that she can be operated without batteries totally destroyed the OM2 to me.

So what didn't i exactly like--batteries or sans batteries can't really destroy the reputation of a camera.

well, 2 shots into the whole 24 frames and it conked out. I woke up at 3am on the day of the funeral to nurse a sore throat and couldn't sleep i decided to test the camera. i shoot and it died; the shutter locked; it remained open just like that and i had no idea what the fuck went wrong. it tested well a month ago when i tried shooting it a couple of frames using it.

i tried detaching the lens, nothing happened. i opened the back of the camera, tried rewinding the film and nothing happened (except that i did expose 3 frames by opening the back of the camera). i tried doing the b settings and tinker with some more buttons and nothing happened. As an evolved dodo, i know that in times like this, there is really nothing to do but google. But I left my viao at the office and though my husband has an internet-ready phone, i practically turn into a luddite when i touch one. There was a computer in the house that is open for everyone to use but i am not very comfortable using other people's computer. besides, it's got a weird search engine app on it that drives me crazy. Then again, i didn't have a choice but to use it. From what i learned from google, OM2, being a super-mega-electronic-automatic-with-first-of-its-kind-off-the film-metering-capabilities-and-two-decades-younger-than-my-sr-t-101 is, i'm so disappointed, a battery guzzler. It requires silver oxides, the way point and shoot digicams, when they first came out, required super-mega-energizer-lithium batts for extended life. The alkaline LR44s that i use for my minoltas, the kind that i can easily get here in Iloilo does not live up to OM2's state of the art needs. (Mark, the camera shop owner said i could still use my LR44s but i sort of forgot to ask him about the draining rates of the LR44s with this cam and it turns out LR44s are useless for this--they drain easily.) The verdict: the camera is useless without the batteries. if you use the om2 with its batteries nearly drained the shutters will lock and remain so until you replace them batts with fresh ones.

eh.

the waiting kills. i had to wait for my husband to be up before i could ask him to fix the thing for me. he was still snoring, as the rest of the world, at 4 am.

i waited. i sipped the lukewarm tea. i read my Granta. i browsed through my August issue of Nat Geo (featuring the pine ridge project of one of my favorite photographers aaron huey).i read again my Granta. i decided to lie down on the rattan sofa. i read again my Granta and remember, shit, I hated my husband yesterday so i shouldn't be talking to him. and that goes with not asking him to do something for me. heh.

but i might for the sake of photography.

No. i still hate him so i am going to need to wait until iloilo so i can have this thing fixed. get me some silver oxides.

And then there was a scream from the room and our 5 year old has awaken, looking for me. He found me at the balcony wrapped in flannel blankets and the useless camera by my side. he asked what i've been taking it with. i said i wanted to take the picture of the gamblers down below from where we were. he asked where his camera was and i said i forgot to bring it with us. he said he also wants to take pictures of his friends.

he asked if he could have some chocolate milk.

I said he can if he'd drink some water first. he nodded and flashed a grin. toothless.

so i gathered my things and went down to the kitchen just as the gamblers were packing up to go home and return to their daily lives.