This last time I took the train. It has been below zero for weeks now and there is just too much snow to cycle in. But as always, you never know what will happen in the winter.

This time, a construction worker pulled down the power line for the train. We were about 10 km out of the next station with a road about 3 or 4 km ahead, but we could not go that way, because of the power line. So we sat … for hours. There was nowhere to go behind us, only forest and forest. It happened at the worst possible place from our point of view.

The ventilation stopped working, the train’s batteries started to drain. The lights went out, the heat was gone.

Finally the military came and cleared a way through the woods so we could get to a road.

Then down the tracks …

And into the woods …

The whole exercise felt a little comical. I had decided to take a suit with me for a Christmas party later on in the week. I was not wearing it, but I was dragging it along, trekking through the woods in shoes that were not meant for the day’s events.

I haven’t been taking as much film as I would like. Instead, I’m trying to see if the Panasonic GF1 will work as a decent replacement for a small 35mm camera.

I don’t usually convert from color to b/w. I did this time because I took the photo, and measured the light, in the same way I would have with an iso 400 black and white film.

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Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days interesting. Well, for example, the other day my wife and I went into town and went into a shop. We were only in there for about 5 minutes. When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. We went up to him and said, “Come on man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?”

He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I called him a Nazi turd. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn tires. So my wife called him a sh..-head. He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first. Then he started writing a third ticket. This went on for about 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote… Personally, we didn’t care. We came into town by bus and saw the car had a sarah palin sticker… We try to have a little fun each day now that we’re retired… It’s important at our age.

One thing I knew I wanted to do this time, was to get a roof on his house. He had put up the walls, but couldn’t afford anything more.

It is a little late, but anything is better than nothing. It is late because the rainy season has been going on for a couple of months and a wall is collapsing in the little hut he, his wife, his two own children and four adopted children have been living in.

Word gets around and Phillip was waiting for me when I arrived. I knew he would be. I was prepared for it and was very happy that what I wanted to help with was exactly what he wanted help with. We hadn’t discussed it before.I didn’t have time to go to the bank so I sent him with some cash to change. It wasn’t enough, but he bought what he could and hid the sheets in the market for safe-keeping:

Believe me, if I tilted that camera upwards and caught some faces I would have left the market as an unhappy man.I took these on my lunch break and by then I had passed by an ATM and pulled out the rest of the cash so he could buy the remaining sheets. While we were at the market he introduced me to his sister:

He is holding the portraits from last year in his hand.I took some more of his sister because she wanted some too the next time I came down.

Just another view taken of her in her daily environment. I bought some cucumbers (5 for 75 cents) and some fruits.

I haven’t done much in the way of processing the images. I am using a laptop (untested) that I brought down. It has Ubuntu installed and I processed the Nikon raw (NEF) files using the GIMP and dcraw (both are available on GNU/Linux).

People come and go as the train fills. There’s plenty of commotion. When I got off in Odense I discovered that my bag was gone. A sly “pick-pocket” had raked it off the shelf as we waited in Copenhagen. The train only stops once between Copenhagen in Odense, so it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

I had a Leica CL, 40/2.0 Summicron, 90/2.8 Tele-Elmarit (Wetzlar, not Canada), Samsung Digital (compact) and the Domke briefcase alone was worth more than the Samsung. Clothes, receipts, … a general insult.

I was away from home (if I really have one) the rest of the week without a camera. Came back over the week-end and tried to get a decent PAW:

The following were taken with an old Rolleiflex:

I wasn’t sure if that one, the one above, was really taken in week 38; it was on the roll, but was in the beginning of the roll and might have been taken during week 37. So for the main, on my PAW page I chose the following one:

There is a little collection of others from the same rolls in the shoebox.