Gesundheit

I had to stop at Target last night to pick up our vacation pictures, so I was a little later getting home than normal. Bob said he tried to call me to check when I would be home, but I didn't answer the phone--I don't know whether it didn't ring, or whether I just didn't hear it in my purse.

Anyway, when I got home he was making my dinner--spaghetti with tomato/green olive/black olive/mushroom sauce--and he had a fire going. The dinner was wonderful. I love the green olives in the sauce. And I had gotten a couple of loaves of seeded French bread, little baguettes--Target has the absolute best French bread, I think. And the fire was wonderful, too.

I ate my dinner, and Bob was watching a Star Trek marathon in the living room. He went upstairs after awhile, and I finished eating and decided to go in and enjoy the fire for awhile. I took my book, and read a little, but the light isn't very good for reading in there (okay, it was probably fine five years ago, but my middle-aged eyes can't deal with dim light reading anymore), and Dinah was there with me, and I laid the book down and closed my eyes and just enjoyed the warmth of the fire . . . and fell asleep, of course. Bob came down and woke me up at 11:00. He said, "Okay, I think it's time you went to bed now."

I sneezed today at work and Eugene said, "Bless you," then he said, "Why do people say that, anyway?" I didn't know, but I looked it up:

The custom of saying "God bless you" after a sneeze was begun literally as a blessing. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 AD) ascended to the Papacy just in time for the start of the plague (his successor succumbed to it). Gregory (who also invented the ever-popular Gregorian chant) called for litanies, processions and unceasing prayer for God's help and intercession. Columns marched through the streets chanting, "Kyrie Eleison" (Greek for "Lord have mercy"). When someone sneezed, they were immediately blessed ("God bless you!") in the hope that they would not subsequently develop the plague. All that prayer apparently worked, judging by how quickly the plague of 590 AD diminished.

So, pictures. The reason there are none is that they were crap. Not, as you might assume, my fault, though. I had them done at Target, and when I dropped the film off, the guy asked me if I wanted the one hour service, and I said I was getting Photo CDs, so they'd have to send them out, and he said no, they do them in-house now. Great, I thought.

I wonder if there was an option to say, "No thanks, please just send them out and I'll wait the extra day or so?"

The prints were fine except for a couple of them at the end of one roll that look like they got stuck in the processing machine and were p-u-l-l-e-d out like you would pull out a piece of paper that got stuck in the printer. But the digital prints on the CD are awful, every one of them. There's a rainbow band across the middle of each of them that I at first assumed was (and which I'm sure they will try to tell me is) the fault of either the film or my camera, but it's on both rolls, so not the film, and it's not on the prints, so not the camera.

There are also TONS of artifacts--little specks of dust and fibers--that show up on the digital pictures but not the prints, which leads me to believe they were on the negative scanner, and a couple of the digital prints look like there was moisture on the glass of the scanner.

So I'll take them back, and I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens. Hopefully I won't have to throw a fit, but if they won't re-do them, I want a refund. I paid over $15.00 a roll for one set of prints and a CD, which is about three times what it should have cost. And they advertise that it's Kodak processing, so it's not like I chose them because they were cheaper. I'm sure Bob will tell me that's what I get for taking them to Target, but I had the Mexico pictures done there, too, and they were fine.