Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' & Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha' 4 November 2025

 

As fall is in transition into winter it is difficult to adapt to dark afternoons. I suffered that problem yesterday Monday. I picked up my daughter Hilary at the gas station on Willingdon and Lougheed Highway at 5:30. We had a 5:45 reservation for the nearby Keg. The corner is a busy one and every time I drive from there to the restaurant I get lost. It seems it never occurs to me to use my handy navigation device.

Going there I made an illegal U-turn without signalling. Immediately a huge police SUV put on its lights. A pleasant and very beautiful female policeman asked me for my reservation. She told me that she was so close to me that she almost hit me. I told her that I not had a ticket in years and that my license was good until 2030. “Not if you lose it,” she said.

A long story short is that I got no ticket. My only excuse was that it was dark and I should have looked at my rear view mirror. I have promised to both my daughters to never make illegal U-turns again.

Today Tuesday, feeling guilty but a relief that did not get into an accident or receive a ticket, I decided to do nothing besides taking Niño for a walk. But this age thing of mine will not stop. I went to Safeway in my bike to get a few groceries and a new bottle of a wellness biofolate. I should have just photographed the empty bottle with my phone. At the Safeway I found the white plastic bottle and through the empty one away. When I arrived home, to my horror I realized I had thrown the full one. I went back and in short order I fished into the garbage bin and found my biofolate.

It is a calming thrill to scan these two plants. It is obvious that Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ is my best fall rose.

Dahlia hybrida 'Hypnotic White' 4 November 2025

As people read less I have notice the terrible encroachment of cliche words like iconic, stunning, award-winning that rub me the wrong way. Is that last choice of mine now also a cliche.

One that comes to mind is “been there, done that.” When my friends tell me that I retort, “but I have not done that yet.” Today I thought of a variation of that expression that I like. It is “was there, lived it.”

To me that expression sums up my 83 years of my life up to know and to realize that I lived over 60% of it with my Rosemary as we were together for 52 years. And the expression does leave room to live a bit more.

Whenever now in my solitude that I share with my cats Niño and Niña I try to find a way of illustrating that feeling with some sort of scan. This particular framed photograph of Rosemary wearing her wedding bird dress has that disarming almost sad look on her face. I never figured out if it was her protestant education in a very small town that contributed to her melancholy look. She did her best to leave New Dublin and graduated with excellent grades from Queen’s University.

For as long as I think about my Rosemary constantly (I will have to make an exit into oblivion to stop it, at the very least I can enjoy looking for excuses to scan my framed and unframed photographs of her.

Osteospermum 2 November 2025

My Rosemary often told me that whatever skill and job performance I had as a photographer had all to do with a good support staff. I must now stress how right she was.

I have often written here that digital cameras assert their ability to have free will even though they are inanimate objects. A few months back during a session in my piano room my Fuji X-E3 refused to work as it told me that it wanted to pair with my cell phone.

The latest intrusion of my X-E3 was that when I used flash in my little studio the results had much too much contrast. Jeff Gin and his wife Teena (I call her Pearl for the finish of Ilford photographic paper) came over on Sunday and after a little late breakfast solved the problem. I wanted to in some way to correspond and show them my gratitude. Teena noticed a late flowering osteospermum. I told her I was going to scan it and make a print. This I did.

As I was removing the little dust particles on my monitor with my Photoshop 8 the dusting tool stopped working. Jeff came to the rescue and told me I had inadvertently had it in another mode. I said nothing, after he fixed it, as I well knew all about what I can now define as free will.