Thanksgiving at New Years

Big excitement at our table this New Year's Eve:


Thanksgiving to New Year's passes even faster than the whoosh of the rest of the year. So this New Year's it was good to have some time to recall the many good happenings of 2008 to our family. The kids, C and I pieced together an impromptu list over dinner.

Sailing in the Virgins with grandparents
June in Hawaii
sister-in-law Carol stayed with us over the summer
M debuted on the musical stage
H and M with new ipods!
H thriving in a new school
M trying the snare drum in band
C a happy interim librarian
C finished her second century on a bike
I got wrapped up in a camera fixation
with the cub scouts at Camp Cutter and at winter camp
Visits to family in RI during business trips to Boston
built a fence with the neighbors
went from two cars to one
bought no new bicycles this year
helped neighbors get married before prop 8 passed
had a joyful Election Day

Happy New Year to all

Shooting film again

Had some fun this weekend developing a roll of black and white film in my kitchen - first time I've developed film since I was a postdoc processing images off a fluorescence microscope. I used Diafine developer. Interesting that google searches for Diafine turn up several pages of photography-related sites and then pages of cell biology journal articles. Seem it's in wide use by bench scientists too! Film was Arista Premium 400 (alledgedly re-badged Kodak Tri-X) shot mostly at an EI of 800 or 1600 in low light, though one or two test shots done at noon in the California sun turned out well too. Quick scanning on an Epson V500 with standard negative holders, film somewhat curled, but turned out OK.

Recession thoughts

So what's the main cause of the current mess?

- living beyond our means over the last two decades (easy credit, excess consumerism)?
- heavily leveraged investment vehicles that became too large a part of our financial fabric?

that is, did the regular "us" cause this, or was it money managers who ruined our sandbox?