Don't Even Try

Don't even bother trying to rip this family off. If you're lucky enough to make it past the hidden cameras, door alarms, lasers, moat, and crocodiles, then you'll have to contend with our children. Step a little too loudly and you'll awake our little ninja. Christian will spring from his dojo, crawl on the ceiling, and smother you like a blanket within two steps of our front door.

Then there's the Pistolera. For fun she pours a little honey on the fence and then shoots the wings off of any approaching flies - from near 50 feet away, no less.

But the deadliest of the bunch is Little Pixie. She looks harmless enough, but she'll kill you with her charm.

PS - the middle photo is the last of my expired Polaroid film. The other two were taken from a new pack of Fuji3000. I punched up the darks a little in Picasa and nothing else. You can see the Polaroid has a brown tone while the Fuji is more clinically B+W.

All The News That's Fit To Print

Christian ran upstairs, grabbed a pencil and a stack of paper, and then disappeared. Erika came up a bit later with a wide grin on her face and bragged "We're watching the news, just like you." Heather and I collectively thought "Oh great, now you can be as depressed as we are."

Heather went downstairs and saw mini-Woodward and mini-Bernstein engrossed in the day's headlines. Heather intervened and said "Hey, uh, you don't have to watch the news, watch some cartoons." Too late. Christian adjusted his hat, bit down a little harder on his cigar and mumbled "Not now, Ma. Gotta a deadline to meet."

Tomorrow I'm going to outfit our little Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane with one of my old Polaroid cameras (the one with actual flash bulbs, yep, I've got one of those), a flip notebook, and a pencil sharpened down to its nub and put them on the most pressing issue of the day - who left the Hostess wrapper in our front yard.

Expired Polaroid Film

It's been a while since I pulled out my Polaroid 600SE. Remember it? That's the camera I got for a song because the eBay seller made the mistake of writing several lines about its damaged housing when what matters most is whether the lens (which contains the shutter) works. And it does. It's a wonderful camera but it's about the size and weight of a microwave oven. To make it work you have to perform a mental checklist which is about a long as the Space Shuttle's. The focus mechanism was probably state of the art when it was manufactured but if you use it long enough your sure to develop a stigmatism. The Polaroid film inside the camera expired in September 2009. I feared that its magical chemicals might have turned to dust. I focused, pulled the trigger, squeezed the chemicals through the camera's rollers, and presto. See the results below.