Visiting Mary

Daphne and I went to visit Mary from my church yesterday. The weather hasn't been that great lately and we figure Mary could use some groceries and some company. It's been cold and it snowed a few times making it difficult to get around. Mary is 93 after all and is a little on the fragile side. Daphne has been shopping with Mary before so she knew what sort of food she likes. So, earlier in the day, she went out and bought some stuff and brought it down.

We had a nice visit. After first arriving Daphne put everything away in Mary's refrigerator. Mary was already watching some TV. She doesn't have cable and the channel she was watching was flickering a bit. So, I tuned it by turning a few knobs one way or another. The Big Bang Theory was on on CTV. It's a popular sitcom.

Mary's friend Valerie had given her a few shots she took at our friends' (Tony and Iris) wedding. We took a look through them. We also saw some shots around Mary's place of her and her dad and three of her brothers. They were in uniform having served in the Canadian military back in World War II. Mary still has three uniforms. One is for summer, one for winter... I forgot what the other one is for. I said I'd bring my camera next time to take photos of her in them.

Mary also showed us some of her soapstone carvings. She has a few wrapped up. At one point she joined a group once a month to do carvings. I can't remember if she's currently going or not. The picture above is one of her carvings of a fish.

As usual, Mary told us a lot of stories about her life growing up. Like my dad, she attended Central Tech. I don't know what my dad took there. Mary said she took a 2-year watchmaking course.

Mary told us more about her life out in Victoria, B.C. We had heard some of it before. She may have been one of the youngest of seven siblings. Her brothers and sisters were kind of mean to her because she was the littlest. They picked on her and made her do most of the chores like chopping kindling and doing laundry. A lot of things were done by hand back then. Poor Mary.

Anyway, we stayed kind of late, until ten to eleven. I thought Mary went to bed earlier, but I guess not. She didn't seem sleepy or anything. It was nice chatting with her again. I'm sure she enjoyed it as much as we did. Until next time...

Dinner with Auntie Mary

After the wedding ceremony everyone went down from the sanctuary to the gym for refreshments and to take group shots. Daphne stayed with Auntie Mary until I finished.

We went to Chinatown afterwards. Auntie Mary wanted to go shopping for food. I waited in the car while they walked around.

After they finished shopping we went to Rol Jui for dinner. We order Auntie Mary some fish congee and Daphne and I split a plate of beef and tomato on rice and chicken and tofu on rice. They also brought us some soup as a starter and some sweet, green bean soup for dessert. It's kind of like red bean soup, but not red. It was tasty.

It's always great going out with Auntie Mary. She always has a lot of interesting stories to tell.

A Weekend for Meeting Old Friends (again!)

Ken MacDonald and Lawrence Law

It's amazing where you'll bump into old friends. I attended the PMA Canada Photo Expo 2010 this past Saturday. I had a code to enter while buying the ticket on-line to get in free. So that was nice.

It was held at the Toronto Congress Centre out by the airport. When I first went into the exhibition hall I was a bit disappointed. It wasn't as big as I imagined it would be. As well... to my utter dismay, the Canon booth was completely empty save a video projector which they used to demonstrate some new products or something. I don't really know because I didn't watch. They didn't have one camera, camera body, lens or anything else. How sad. One of the two reps there mentioned to someone else that a lot of the retailers there sold their products. So if you wanted to see them you could go over to their booths. How lame is that? Every other camera company had a full compliment of equipment. Man... if I were a Nikon user I would have been drooling at their display.

Anyway, I got to the show fairly early because I had signed up for some of the early seminars on-line. Well it turns out you didn't need to sign up to see them. Anyone just walking by could pull up a chair and take a seat.

Since I was slightly bored after I first walked in I decided not to wait for the first seminar I wanted to see to start. That was one on Lighting Tips. Instead I started with the one on Youth Sports Photography. It was lead by a fellow from Florida who's been doing it for a number of years. It was informative. Though I'd never get into it. It may be profitable if you can establish yourself, but it's pretty much like shooting portraits at Walmart. Boring as heck. You have no creative freedom at all.

I missed the Lighting Tip seminar because the Youth Sports talk overlapped it. But, they were going to hold it again a little later so it was fine.

In the end I ended up attending just about all the seminars. The only one I wasn't too interested in was Fantastic Framing. I thought it was about framing your photo in the viewfinder. But, it was actually about real picture frames.

The Lighting Tips seminar was cool. The equipment is way too expensive for me though. I also went to a talk on How to Print on Various Media and presented by and Epson rep. That was useful. He spoke a lot about calibrating your monitor properly so that if you're printing your work out what you see on your monitor will resemble your physical print.

He spoke again on Calibrating and Printing. That talk was similar to his first one. One thing he emphasize other than keeping your monitor calibrated was not to use the SRGB (standard RGB) setting in Photoshop. That dumbs down your picture to the lowest quality. It's good for internet use he said, but if you're going to print your stuff out you're losing so many colours you could have used. And he says to shoot in RAW instead of JPG.

Anyway, I stayed longer than I thought I would. In doing so I managed to bump into quite a few friends. Two were former co-workers from Trader, Carol Chan and Rosa. Carol's still there. Rosa left quite a few years ago. She's married to Jeff Wessling who just left this past year. As well I bumped into Big Jon (Wong). He was there with his friend Jackie from RHCCC (Richmond Hill Chinese Community Church). I actually met her once or twice a few years back when I went to see those guys at softball practice.

Now those weren't the only old friends I met on Saturday. In the evening Daphne dropped by to give me some TIFF vouchers from Diane. Since I have the most free time it's my job to go down to the TIFF box office at King and Peter Streets to pick up movie tickets.

When Daph came over I mentioned we should go over and hang at Tim Hortons. I had my nephew's polar bear puzzle game she likes playing. So we went over the for a bite and to chill.

Well part way through the time that we were there who should show up, but one of my old college classmates, Ken MacDonald. I actually found him on Facebook a short time ago, but we really didn't have any contact even through it.

It had been in or around 20 years since we last saw each other. Our graphic design program concluded in 1990. After that, like many of our other classmates, we parted ways never to see each other again. With the advent of the internet and social networking sites like Facebook it became possible to look people up again. But, still, when you meet them face to face that's the best.

Ken is doing well. He had been working in graphic design for awhile, with the military or something like that I believe. He switched roles to the hardware part of computers more recently. But, I think he's still with them. He's going to Ottawa for work soon. When he returns he'll move into his new condo at Dundas and Keele (I think).

He was in my neighbourhood because he just finished seeing The Expendables at Yonge/Eglinton Silver City with his friend Chris. We'll definitely have to try to round up a few of our other former classmates to do something in the not too distant future.