Friday, October 09, 2020

Green milk

 2020 10 10

Day 6

I got up early to go outside to the exercise lot, the portion of the hotel parking lot that has been fenced off and used as a space to go to walk around, stand in the sun or shade, to exercise.   Aside from the smoking section in front of the hotel (and who wants to go there), the exercise lot is the only place to really go.

It wasn’t to get the blood pumping for me, it was to do another time lapse.   This time looking at the building as the sun moved behind it.   I figured with the camera tilted up no one would get in the way of the lens even if they were tall.   There were a a number of runners that got pretty close to the tripod but none of them bumped it.

We have a limited time frame out there because the guards need to go home to sleep and all that.   So we can go out between 07:00 and 21:00.   I went out at 07:30, set up the tripod, came back in at 09:00, had breakfast, went back out at 10:00 and was out there until 13:00.

Having a thing, whether it be a camera on a tripod, or a piece of chalk, people are going to make conversation.   I met a few people and talked to security and some army guards that changed shifts.   Exchanged a few stories from living in Canada and how the lock down was going over there to how things were going over here.   The conversations made the time go by pretty quickly and before I knew it I was going back inside to the warm hotel.

My lunch was waiting for me in a brown paper bag.   And next to it were three other paper bags with the groceries I had ordered online last night from the countdown grocery store, kind of like loblaws, it’s a large grocery store chain.   I wanted to buy some green milk but as it turns out there’s a $50 minimum to be able to use the delivery service plus there’s a $15 service charge.   My tiny fridge might be able to fit 10 bottles of milk. It I thought I’d get some fruit and some other stuff.


- 1.5 L bottle of lime flavoured milk

- 1.5L bottle of banana flavoured milk

- 2 x 1kg cartons of Jazz apples

- 280g bottle of vegemite

- 250g Whittaker’s creamy milk Hazelnut Block

- 400g Hubbards crispy crunchy granola (raspberries, cranberries, coconut, currants, cashews, buckwheat, and sunflower seeds)

The fact that all the items I bought are made in New Zealand aren’t a coincidence.

Wednesday, May 06, 2020

Steve in the Fiat


Steve in the Lego Fiat 500 (afternoon shoot)

Woke up super early today 5:00am.  To get outside to do a small photo shoot across the street before the sun came up. I had just received the fiat500 model car by LEGO.   I spent yesterday, roughly seven hours assembling it.   It turns out it’s hamster scale.  So today I would take Steve out and work the camera.   It’s been awhile. I wasn't really that happy with the photos.  It was too dark.  If I left the shutter open any longer Steve would be blurry, or I'd lose depth of field had I changed the F-stop.

I did another shoot in the afternoon in the front yard.   With this lock down, quarantine in place there’s not a lot of places to go.   So I have limited options.   While shooting Steve in the front yard, I lost a piece of LEGO of the car.   Being yellow it blended in with all the grass and dandelions.   The OCD part of me was cursing inside.  But luckily it’s not my first missing a piece of LEGO rodeo.   Because the set is from this year, and new, it would mean that replacement parts could be ordered from the LEGO site.  No problem.   No stress.   Just log in and order another piece.

The stress levels sprang back up as I logged in and realized that LEGO is still under quarantine operation.   I already have two emails that are in a queue in which they never got back to me on their, I’m guessing, smaller staff.   Turns out that the LEGO company has shut down the Canadian part replacement service.  Ugh!  

The American service was still open so I thought I’d just run the part number through the database to see if it was even in stock.   It was, and could be mine for the cost of 15 cents (US) and shipping.   As they probably don’t ship to Canada, I mean that’s what the Canadian store is for, I would have to ship it to a friend in the USA and then have them ship it to me.   While doable I thought maybe I’d sleep on it.

All kinds of scenarios popped up in my dreads about that stupid brick.   Maybe it got flung out of the bag I was carrying it in from the wind, or maybe the hamster grabbed it as a trophy and hit it inside it’s sleep pod to snuggle over, or maybe it flew out under a clump of grass, near a rock, maybe a crow took it after that to reward a small child.  I woke up, by this time it was around 12:30am.  Put on the pants, and went outside with a flashlight.   I figured it would be easier to find a piece of plastic at night because the flashlight would reflect differently on the plastic object than on the grass.  

In less than a minute I had found it.   It was sitting right under where I would have been photographing from.  The yellow piece of plastic stuck out like a sore thumb.   I went back inside and placed it back on the car model not allowing for chance to have me lose it again but in the apartment.

I went back to sleep.