Many years ago when film was plentiful and Polaroid made film for my médium format RB-67 I used to peel the photographs from my Polaroid back and throw them away.

Photographers have a way of not following rules so soon a few had found out that the peels (they were negative-like) of Polaroid Colour Instant Film did not fade and that they could be scanned. It seems that Polaroid peels (as I call them) were in wait of a technology (scanners) that made them relevant and in many ways quite beautiful.

Polaroid Instant Film (not the Instamatic kind) is dead. For a few years we photographers switched to unusually good Fuji Film FP-300B B+W and FP-100C Colour. The former now discontinued produced negatives that partially solarized. The scanning results were most interesting. The latter colour film has been recently discontinued but there are rumours that Fuji is going to manufacture it in batches.

The initial problem with the Fuji Instant Colour peels is that the image fades in short minutes. I have been able to take the peel to a waiting scanner and produce a sort of Polaroid transfer (as they used to be called). The peel itself when carefully bleached makes a strange sort-of-negative. My friend baroque bassist Curtis Daily and I compared notes on the process and have found a foolproof method for bleaching them without flaws.

Lee Lytton III HS Class of 1961 in Sarita Texas

My Argentine first cousin and godmother, Inesita O’Reilly Kuker, 92 fell and broke her hip a few weeks ago. Her family is waiting for her heart to give out or for her to stop breathing. I am extremely sad as our trip (my Rosemary and my 14 year-old granddaughter Lauren) to Buenos Aires in March will not have Inesita meeting Lauren.

I have been thinking of the losses of my older friends in that last few years. What I miss most about them is that they were from a generation of outgoing and warm people. I miss human warmth in Vancouver of cold rainy winters and  people that I would once compared to the very cold city tap water.

I look forward to my trip to Austin, Texas and to meeting up with the few friends of my generation who are left.

I plant to attend Brother Rommard Barthel’s memorial service in spite of the fact he was never my teacher. We conversed long hours in my multiple stays at St. Joseph Hall, invited by that other beacon of warmth, Brother Edwin Reggio, CSC.

I single out Mike O’Connell (a definite undersclassman from my perspective of being from the HS Class of 1961) as a person who has shown me the warmth I so miss now. He will up the ante on heat this Thursday night at Ruby's

And there is another gentleman who will be in attendance, Lee Lytton III who four years ago hosted us at his Sarita hometown and gave my wife and two granddaughters a taste of real Texas hospitality.

It wasn’t until I was 15 that I first used a phone. In my boyhood Argentina (a third world country even then) by 195,1 when I was 9, my mother bought a refrigerator from a departing American. I remember that the fridge had the compressor on the top. It was with that fridge that I made my first Lime Jell-O. Before that the “hielero” would come once a week and he would place a large block of ice in our icebox.

In 1953  I was invited to the house of the daughter (her name was Susan Stone) of the CEO for General Motors in Argentina. That's where I saw my first TV. She sent her father’s Cadillac to pick me up at our humble home.

It was not until the early 70s that globalization began to affect the holidays of other countries. I remember some kids in the street in Mexico City wanting me to give them money,”Danos nuestro halouin.”

But it was in 1957 when I was in the 8^th grade of a small one room school house in Nueva Rosita when I discovered San Valentín. The school was were the children of the engineers of the American Smelting and Refining Company learned an American curriculum. My mother was the teacher.

I hoped against all hope that the lovely Anna María Ramos who was in the 7^th grade would send me a valentine card. She did but I was too shy to acknowledge it!

Valentine’s was special even in my high school at St. Ed’s in Austin. It was a boy’s school but I never received a card from the cute and very short Judy Reyes who was a cheerleader. From my vantage point of the school band, where I played the alto saxophone I would sigh when she would jump at football games and reveal her underwear.

Now Valentine’s day has little meaning for me. This morning I brought breakfast in bed for my Rosemary but since we do this every day it was not in any way special.

Thinking on how I would illustrate this I immediately knew I would find the picture of Salem holding her heart-shaped pillow.

In my beginning darkroom in Arboledas, Estado de México around 1971 my darkroom was the bathroom in my shop. As you might imagine my shop where I had a bench saw and I made furniture which I then spray painted with automobile lacquer did not provide a dust-free environment with darkroom.

When we moved to Vancouver, in our first house in Burnaby I had a splendid and very large and pristine darkroom with its own separate bathroom.

In our Kerrisdale, on Athlone Street house my darkroom was a good one but it had poor ventilation. The bathroom was at the end of a short aisle.

I am harping about the bathrooms because they were where I hung my wet negatives to dry.

Now in my fourth (and obviously) last little home I have no darkroom. I have my colour negative film processed by The Lab. I process my b+w film in the bathroom in the upper guest room.

Today Sunday, February 12, 2017 marks the passing of exactly 4000 blogs since I started in January 2006. When I wrote those early blogs I had no idea what a blog was or why I was doing it. I have written a few blogs on why I blog and now today looking back, what comes to mind is one of the most influential books I have ever read. It was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man. I bought it in the late 60s in Buenos Aires.

In hindsight some folks believe Chardin predicted the world wide web with his concept of a Noosphere which would envelop the world in pure thought. Chardin was an avid believer of evolution. But within his idea he championed the idea that organisms evolved from simplicity to complexity. While Chardin, a Jesuit, was prohibited from publishing his books while alive, in the photographs of him taken by Philippe Halsman I gaze on the face of an extremely intelligent man who is looking at a rosy future. I am not sure of that.

Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “Noosphere”, in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism.

Of late as I am plagued by en ever more complex world I do not see that Chardin rosy future.

My old computer (a PC) has a 14 year-old Photoshop that works beautifully for my needs. I calibrate my cathode ray tube monitor for colour by matching it to the gray background of my web page and blog.

Today when I finally was able to figure out how to download from my PC to my brand new Microsoft Surface laptop/tablet the colour was accurate and whites were whites and grays were grays.

But I cannot transfer my old Photoshop. I have to (and I will not) buy a subscription and then download it. I cannot transfer my perfectly serviceable Word for the same reason. I had to pay $50 for a year’s subscription.

Tell me is things are better. Tell me if this is an improvement.

While I do not hark back to land lines (I have one) with dialing black phones, it seems that the improvements are just a case of making stuff more complex just to make it more complex.

I was not able to download the new Microsoft Office product to my Surface today. I was with a computer expert (Powersonic on Bridgeport Road). I was told xx, whatever. So I called the tech number for help:

1. The number was answered immediately. Odd?

2. I mentioned what a pleasure it was not to have to wait. Silence on the other side.

3. I explained the problem. I was told that he was going to talk to a supervisor.

4. He came back to tell me that he had to get into my computer.

5. I said, “Oh, you want to hack into my computer!”

6. The man said, “I am pissed.”

7. I asked him to repeat that. He did.

8. I hung up.

I went to the folks at Best-Buy who told me the Microsoft website that I had gone to was one they had never seen  before.

Tell me that things are better just because they are more complex.