It should read like a B-Movie thriller, "Return form the In-Laws!!!"  Will our heroes return with their sanity in tact?  What strange dialect of English will they speak when they return??

Fortunately, a convergence of events led to a late departure to Johnstown this weekend.  I wasn't feeling very well, and the doctor had prescribed something that made me sleep for most of the weekend.  Besides that, it was raining fairly heavily.  Although, I did take the time to coat Berta's car windshield with Rain-X before the trip.

I'm amazed with formal-ish meetings generally in the amount of effort spent on protocol.  While I'm convinced that a total lack of protocol would cause the people of the world to do nothing but bash each others' heads, if you examine the thickness of layers of protocol observed at a typical family dinner, I think you, too, will be overwhelmed, or at least impressed.

Could you please pass the salt.  What a lovely setting.  The food sure was good.  This didn't come from a can, did it?  --  It's all too... too... obsessive.  Berta and I have had friends that could never get beyond this level of formality into a realm of comfort.  There's a certain surety that you can trust in a friend to tell you that your food is too dry or only fit for dogs.

It's not that I am not grateful for the meal or that it wasn't good.  After all, if things are as bad as I hear at dinner conversation, I'm lucky we're eating anything at all.  Maybe it's the infrequency with which we visit that makes things seem awkward.  People should be able to sit down to eat with each other and not have to worry about being proper (not to say they shouldn't be civil) and topical.

I'm sick of the gloom.  So, anyway...

I took a bunch of pictures while we were out there.  On black and white film.  This is, as you may guess, unusual, since we've got the nice digital camera and all.  But the cool thing about the film camera that we have (also a nice camera, a Minolta Vectis S-1) is that it's splash-proof.  So it's good for taking pictures in the rain.

It's also good for taking pictures that you want to print out.  This is something weird that I suppose is related to the economics of film processing.  If I take a roll to the store and tell them that I want only a PhotoCD, they will tell me that I have to have the roll printed anyway.  So, I can't get just the CD.  I must get the prints, too.  I suppose their markup is all in the prints, because the CD costs virtually nothing.

Of course, these days, they're not producing PhotoCDs with PCD images on them at the local film processing center.  You're only getting JPG scans of the printed image.  This all seems very silly to me and has me wishing that a local shop had the equipment to go straight from film directly to PCD negative scans.  They're much more useful than the JPG disks that they press now.

Maybe one of these things should be part of my evil plan.  Anyway, I'll find a way to get those pictuers online if they're any good.  That is to say, you'll probably never see them.