Today I took a friend up on her previously made suggestion and made a chocoflan. I had a bundt pan that I borrowed for a different cake, so I figured this was the time to do it.
Hopefully it works out...The flan was leaking out of the blender while I was mixing up the cake. I guess I'll find out in the morning when I take it out of the pan.
I'm being cautiously optimistic.
A few months back I was given a box of random "camera stuff." In that box were a couple of point and shoots and the most random, weird digital camera I think I've ever seen.
As much fun as that weird digital camera is, one of the point and shoots came with a roll of film inside.
Today I took a battery out of my Nikon N70 and stuck it into that camera. It is a Minolta Freedom Zoom 160 Date (a mouthful is what it is). I turned it on, and it went right back off. After I turned it on again, I saw that the battery was about dead. Which doesn't surprise me. It's been in that N70 for close to a year and a half now.
The other battery from the N70 was strong enough to tell me that 7 exposures had been used on that roll. It was also strong enough to set the date and let me finish the roll that was in there. Fortunately it was a roll of 24. If it was 36, I would have probably had problems.
I'm both curious and terrified about what is on the first 7 shots of that roll. I'll be interested to see if the date is printed on the picture or not. If so, I will be learning how long that roll sat in the camera. If the film is any good.
Honestly, this lens really nails the color of the sky and really gets the vibes of the Yashica "Red Special" FX-3 pics I took last year at a different park.
Man, eff the news.
Seriously.
What fresh Hell did we get into here? I have grown to despise social media these days, because it's mostly a never-ending doom scroll supermarket tabloid. It was bad enough with the rando crap on facebook, but now it is full of AI generated crap and so much nonsense it's not even funny.
I'll admit that I'm probably doing it wrong, what with only having one friend anymore, but you know.
Someone I would like to consider a good friend said something to me about a mutual friend not understanding her struggles in life.
It actually hit pretty hard for me. I kind of answered her comment on a very practical level, but it occurred to me shortly after I hit send, that on a more personal level, I didn't really answer part of it. Admittedly, that is a conversation to be had in person, but in short, it is hard to understand what someone is going through if they don't tell you about it.
This particular friend has told me a little bit of her story that she hasn't shared with this other friend, and it seems there was some contention between the two, and it was pertaining to one not knowing a part of the other person's story.
I had an experience the other day where I commented upon a recipe that was frequently made in my house as a child. Someone asked if my parents were paying for my therapy for preparing that for us to eat, but I couldn't bring myself to be annoyed because she didn't know about the time in my life in which we were so poor it wasn't even a joke. Like so poor that there were times where things like running water weren't a thing. Or the trips to the grocery store where I was handed a calculator and told that $25 was all the money we had for food for four people that week, and to say stop when we got to that number.
Why? Because I've never really shared that part of my life with too many people. I am, in fact, pretty sure this is the first time I've recounted anything like that here. I suspect that my sister dying is the hardest thing I've written about in this space to date.
That was almost twenty-two years ago. Reading through that hit me really hard today. I'm pretty sure most of my current friends don't even know about that one.
In the intervening time, a great deal of things happened resulting in that room being a dangerous place to walk for several months. I had some time over the weekend. I did some work in that room and got to the point where I could safely move about in there. I cleared off the desk and started cutting and scanning film.
These rolls cover 4th of July both 2024 and 2025, my trip to Lake Michigan in 2024, Yellowwood State Forest in 2024 and a bit from 2025 and the Rushville Steam Engine show from 2025.
Here are a few of the scans. They won't be labeled as to what is what, but I'll fill in the holes once the scanning is done.
I played a short game of TTR: New York with someone this evening. It was her first time playing that one. Honestly, she did fairly well.
