The first scans of my 6x17 images from Samo

 What is Samo? Funny you should ask. Samo is the contraction for Santa Monica, and I went there on Saturday, June 19th. I stayed there for almost five hours, and was so exhausted at the end that I had to take some Tylenol for the pain in my legs. I drove home and made it, and I am thankful for that.

Today was Father's Day, but now, I don't have a Father. He passed away two years ago, and while the pain is not as searing as it was then, it is still there, a pain which is becoming more mute. I think we are all adjusting little by little. I look at my mom and I think I see someone who still struggles with her grief, but she is keeping it in check.

So, today, we would have given my dad cards with money, and in some years, he would have made a carne asada, or more often, he would have gone to the Pechanga casino. In these last two years, he was so sick he could not make that trip any longer, he was living in so much fear. I hate to write this, because we were all blind to the signs of his coming passing, and he was as well, but I have to leave a record. 

All my sisters and my brother came to the house briefly today. We have my dad's ashes here still in his box. My little sister, of course, lives here, but my other two sisters came and brought their families. My brother, with whom I am not reconciled, came briefly, and he was crying off and on. I don't know what is happening, he just will not make the mental adjustment. He is supposedly trying to overcome his alcoholism, but is is a problem now of over two decades, and he refuses to get the serious treatment he needs. We all think he needs to finally, finally, finally do what we first started asking him to do 15 years ago, and I used to joke about 20 years ago, which is that he needs to go to rehab. But he will not.

But getting back to photography, since I had done precious little today except nap and fritter away my time on the web, I decided in the afternoon to develop two rolls from my Samo trip on Saturday. They were both HP5+. I also found some old plastic reels in the garage that will replace the ones I have been using, which are now entirely "gunked up" and giving me problems when I try to load them. 

Here are my first four scans. These are screen grabs, once again, because this site will not allow me to upload the massive scans which, ironically enough, are prepared with a very modest resolution.