No Flash Fiction — Have A Time Machine, Instead

As we all know, Thursday is normally the time for my weekly post regarding Chuck Wendig’s weekly Flash Fiction Challenge. However, this week it’s again a simple “Write a one sentence thing” assignment, to be posted directly to his site.

Instead, stealing a meme from the Twitter and Facebook worlds where Thursdays are “Throwback Thursdays”, here are some pictures from (probably) very early 1973. At the time I was just starting to take a LOT of pictures (it had to have started somewhere) and with film and processing being expensive, I was learning how to do my own darkroom work. I also was buying black and white 35mm film stock in 100′ rolls and loading my own 36-frame film cartridges in order to save money.

These pictures are recently scanned from those 40+ year old negatives.

Winter in small-town southern Vermont. I was probably standing in snow up to my hips on the hill above the town square in order to take this.

Very, very early experiments to see what simple astrophotography I could do. I didn’t have anything that might be described as a decent camera, just a box-like Brownie for myself and an ancient 35mm Argus (?) camera of my dad’s that I could borrow at times. It wasn’t an SLR, had no “auto” anything, focusing was sort of hit or miss, and you had to guess (or learn) at setting the exposure and f/stop manually. It did not have interchangeable lenses and I didn’t have a telescope yet, so I was trying to see if I could take pictures of the moon using a pair of binoculars with the camera held up to the eyepiece.

The exposure’s all wrong, it’s not in good focus at all — but it’s almost kinda-sorta maybe recognizable as the moon?

My sister’s kitten. She probably got it for Christmas and the critter went through multiple names. I think it was originally Thumper, which changed to something like “Doofus” when my parents inherited the cat when my sister moved out a few years later. The name later devolved into “Doovie” and the cat got big, fat, slow, friendly, toothless, and drooly. Unless I’m completely mis-remembering (which is quite possible) she lasted long enough for at least a couple of my kids to play with in the late 1980’s.

Sixteen or seventeen years old for a cat? Could be, Joey Chan’s already coming up on fourteen and she seems healthy enough, except for “feline Alzheimer’s.” (She’s forgotten to be aloof and now wants to be petted and held.)

A special note for the wallpaper – the polka dots were black, silver, and brown. I really wish I had a color picture. (I might have 8mm film, maybe I could find a really tiny and grainy frame to scan.) The only thing that screamed “EARLY SEVENTIES!” louder than that wallpaper was the wallpaper in every other room of the house. With eight kids, three stories, and seven bedrooms, we had a LOT of really bizarre wallpaper that seemed perfectly normal and trendy at the time.