Happy Old Year

We ended 2010 watching a family of deer grazing at the birdfeeder in our front yard. 

Just now, I began the conscious portion of my 2011 watching a spider climbing the wall next to me.

I don't see the latter as a bad omen, but the deer moment was certainly a good one, and one that put a beautiful and unique touch on what, for us, was one of the best and most important years ever.

That goes against the general trend I've been reading in various friends' posts, statuses and tweets, I know; the consensus is that 2010 sucked. Certainly, it did at the employment office, the ballot box, the funeral home for a lot of people. I shared all of that pain- our income was down in 2010, the election results were abysmal for the most part, and I lost one of my longest and dearest friends during the year- but so much good made up for all of that.

We finished our long struggle to get all of our debt under control. Other than our mortgage and, now, Emily's college bill, we are completely debt-free, and have begun saving again for retirement.

That college bill is worth every penny. Em has found a program that she loves, that seems to love her back, and has tackled her first college experience with way more grace and maturity than I did mine. She's remained committed to a boyfriend who is also worth every ounce of the effort, who we adore and who we will be seeing with her later today.

Speaking of ounces, I have far fewer of them than I did this time last year. After years of just mucking about, I've found a combination of efforts and, importantly, instruction that have made a big difference not only in how I look but how I feel.

Eleanor has found a passion for instructing others, as well- in something that has always been one for her. While she ended 2009 demonstrating, mostly, pre-packaged products for Wegmans, she enters 2011 developing and writing recipes for a smaller, closer-to-home and closer-to-nature store that she just formed a bond with after visiting them a few times.

We didn't get to travel the country, or even leave it as we'd briefly planned to in December, but I did get to see old friends at that one funeral home in February, and to meet new ones as well as seeing my grandnephew's christening on a brief weekend away in March. My ballpark roadtrip remains in the future, but one way or another that story will write itself.

Our sports teams sucked, the weather was all over the place, and we had the occasional bump and bruise along the way, but those don't seem to distinguish any year from any other these days;)

In the face of constant memes here, my brain's been kicking around a Ten Most Important Years Of My Life series, and I'm pretty sure that 2010 made the cut. Over the coming weeks, I'll occasionally write on what the other nine years were all about and why. I settled on "most important" rather than "best," because some weren't completely great and yet still left the most major impacts on where I ended that year and who I eventually became.

I thank you all for all the times you've looked in on us in the past year, and genuinely look forward to you being there in the year ahead, too:)

Everything looks worse in black and white

I posted, a few months back, about the end of a photographic era- one that had begun in Rochester, passed for many years through Grand Central Station, and was destined to end when 2010 did. The prior post talked about the man entrusted with the last-ever produced roll of Kodachrome- Steve McCurry, an AP fotog who took it on a farewell tour of New York City (including a cameo by Robert DeNiro) and Southern Asia, where he'd made his bones with the little yellow box.

Yesterday, though, came word of the real end of the trail- and it was not at Kodak Office or in Midtown Manhattan, but at a small processing store in Parsons, Kansas:

An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.

That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.

In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced here, transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of vivid slides.

In the span of minutes this week, two such visitors arrived. The first was a railroad worker who had driven from Arkansas to pick up 1,580 rolls of film that he had just paid $15,798 to develop. The second was an artist who had driven directly here after flying from London to Wichita, Kan., on her first trip to the United States to turn in three rolls of film and shoot five more before the processing deadline.

The artist's name is Aliceson Carter; the railroad worker, Jim DeNiro. (Just kidding; that would've been too surreal. It's DeNike.)  She got a picture of him on one of her last rolls.  One of the final visitors before them was Steve McCurry, who brought the last roll in personally to be processed at the last facility. 

“I wasn’t going to take any chances,” he explained.

Yet in these moments of high nostalgia and fond remembrance, the final word must go to the Great Yellow Father itself, which responded exactly as I would've expected them to given the past quarter century that I've known them:

Kodak declined to comment for this article.

And there you have it- straight from the foot in the corporate horse's mouth.