Not that I haven’t been taking pictures, but they’re not anything you probably want to see. I’ve been in the basement going through all the accumulated photo stuff, taking pictures of all the negative carriers and processing tanks and reels and darkroom guides and master darkroom guides and paper safes, and thinking. It wasn’t – no, it was bad, and then there was the sound of a negative carrier clicking shut and all of a sudden I could see my dad and my brother and me, all of us with all that knowledge in our hands and me the last one of us and I can’t touch the stuff, and here I am packing it up to sell to somebody who won’t know that if you want to bump that highlight there just a touch, you put your finger in the developer and bring the temp up right there –

So it all has to go. Well, not all of it. I’m planning on keeping the old metal film containers, and a reel and tank or two, because you really can’t trust anybody else to process your film. But all the rest of it will go, somehow.

But I don’t live in the basement, after all. I’ve almost finished that sweater, that one I wanted to have done by October. It’s a good thing I wasn’t too specific about the year, eh? And I took Bigfoot over to Walmart to go grocery shopping, because of the go-carts, remember? You can’t follow somebody too close when they’re in one of those things, because there’s no body english. You let go of the throttle and they just stop. Weird, going around a store with somebody in one of those, following ten steps behind.

So he’s grabbing a few things, and he goes down the chip aisle. And stuck in the Pringle’s rack we find this guy;

“If you found him at Walmart, why is he sitting in your kitchen window, k?”

Well, I found him and I picked him up and I found out he was a squeaky toy and I squeaked him, and then I put him down. And we went into the soda aisle and got down the big bottle of Coke, and then Bigfoot went back in the chip aisle, past the squeaky toy again. So I picked him up and squeaked him again. And Bigfoot said, “Put him in the cart.”

Now he’s mine. The odd thing is, squeaking him is only funny when I do it. When anyone else does it, it’s annoying.

But I’ve decided it isn’t shoppers changing their minds that leave stuff tucked into stray corners all over the store. It’s a marketing strategy. Works for me.