Bon, ‘faut pas craquer, je m’applique. Having not yet achieved the results I was hoping for, which would be nothing short of « divine perfection », I am still regularly experimenting with le flan. Here’s the updated recipe. See also Flan pâtissier - 1er essai for the initial results and full length cooking drama.

The dough hasn’t changed much, but the quantities are now reflecting an overwhelming North American tendency to use the dreaded « cup » as a measuring unit, a nightmarish fact that has kept me on my toes doing intense maths. Here’s the formula for the dough:

• 1.4 cups flour (fun to play with)
• 125 g butter (my favourite)
• a pinch of salt (also called a sprinkle or a dusting of. By me.)
• a pinch of sugar (also called a tease or a sneeze of. By me too.)
• an egg yoke (not to be confused with my flight sim yoke)
• a bit of water (1024 bits of water being equal to a kibibit)
• 120 cl of hope (I’ve increased the dosage, success having been elusive)

« The making of » the dough is available at a reasonable cost, but you can also find it for free in the above mentionned post. I’m getting better at it. It no longer sticks desperately to the counter in an heroic effort to avoid the oven - and I have also perfected my technique when the times comes to lift it up, rolled flat, into the cooking pan. Now, this is very scientific, so pay attention... Since I don’t have a flat and thin mobile surface I could roll the dough on and then lift the whole apparatus and reverse into the pan, I use two clean sheets of paper taped to the counter. When the dough is flat and stretched, I undo the tape, put the pan on top and spin everything upside down. I cracked myself up so hard doing this that I almost dropped the whole thing!

Ok, dough in the buttered pan, pre-cooking is the same as before, I use my thickest spoons as weights to prevent the dough from rising like a balloon!

On to the flan itself. After experimenting with brown sugar, icing sugar and maple syrup, I am back to the basics: plain, normal white sugar. I’ve switched from corn starch to custard powder just because I was out of the former. It’s basically the same stuff, with a bit of salt, flavor and color added. So the flan formula looks like this:

• 1 liter whole milk (I never saw parts only of milk in a store, they must throw them away.)
• 0.8 cups sugar (notice, once again, the scientific precision; it’s not 3/4 cup, it’s 0.8. There.)
• 0.8 cups cornstarch (in this case Bird’s Custer Powder)
• 2 eggs + 2 yokes (the most fun part of the entire recipe being when I get to crack the shells...)
• 2 to 3 tsp pure vanilla extract

Pre-heat the oven to 1.21 jigowatts, or just 375°F. I used to get mixed results when mixing all this, at times ending up with a rather chunky cream but I’ve got it down to a drill. Bring the milk (minus one glass which is used to mix the cornstarch and eggs) and the sugar plus one tsp of vanilla to a boil. While this is happening, mix in a bowl the glass of milk, 2 more tsp of vanilla, the cornstarch and the eggs. I’d love to experiment with electricity but all I’ve got is a hand whip, so I go crazy for a few minutes until I feel like a few more visits to the gym are needed and the mix is unctuous.

When the milk is boily, I pour it into the bowl (and not the other way around) slowly, while whipping lightly to mix it well. Then the whole flan mix goes back into the pot and, over medium fire, is stirred into a thick cream. At times the bottom tends to send chunks up and I then use the whip to beat the crap out of those chunks, with the pan lifted momentarily off the stove. Eventually, the mix is so thick it uncovers the sides of the pot when stirred. That’s my signal. The original recipe said « let it boil for a few seconds », so I do, having no idea of what that does, but it’s fun because I can see the bubbles approaching the surface way before they burst. The things I’ll do to amuse myself.

The flan is poured into the pre-cooked crust and evened out, and stuck in the oven at 375°F. At precisely 35 minutes, I take it out and carefully brush a thin coat of apricot jam onto the surface, and put it back in. 5 minutes later, I switch the oven to broil for another 3 minutes. (This time, distracted by my post, I went to 6 minutes, and those 3 extra minutes made a huge difference; I wanted to avoid the brown patches that look like a skin desease.)

I let the flan cool off for a while, then put it in the fridge to get it to become a little firmer. Voila.

[2:00 pm prelude. Don’t look at the pictures yet.]

It’s hot. I don’t do the beach thing too often but after writing my epiphany of bitching and highlighting the fact I live on the water, I figured I might as well take myself seriously and cross the street over to summerland. Don’t they say that life is a beach and then you dive? Of course, today being the first of July, I’m not alone here. However so far the crowds haven’t given me the creeps. The day is warm and slightly hazy, Vancouver true to herself, contrasty and ambivalent. While frying on the hot sand, I’m looking to the north at the patches of snow remaining on mountains around Grouse. A grey heron flies by, seaplanes are lining up for their final approach over Stanley Park, a large yellow chopper is circling around a giant Super Post-Panamax gantry crane carefully hoisted on a freighter, probably awaiting extreme low tide to go under Lion’s Gate Bridge to the Port of Vancouver. Sea kayaks are sliding along on the calm sea. I won’t last long. This just isn’t me; but I’d like for my skin to remember years spent in the tropical sun, so that it won’t lose its tolerance and sense of humour. If the temperature can drop a little, I’ll go running and then later venture back out to shoot the Canada Day fireworks. Sand. It sneaks everywhere. The last time I was lying on a beach, Marie was to my right and adorable penguins were walking by. The water was clearer but not much warmer. It was another hemisphere, another continent. The same story, unfolding slowly.

...

[Hours later, on the Seawall by the 9 O’clock Gun. 10:15 pm.]

The crowd is sneaking into every little corner of my personal space, just like sand did so earlier. Human rivers have poured out of the downtown core like hot lava out of its crater, unstoppable, destructive. We’re talking about very well behaved lava, here, this being Vancouver. But the fact remains that I am no vulcanologist and would be much happier under my canopy or alone with Marie at the top of a high mountain. The fireworks soon begin. They are disappointing compared to the Celebration of Light. I do my thing and then follow the flow back to town, itching everywhere. What do we have to be so proud or happy about, celebrating Canada Day while Canadian soldiers are killing and dying overseas in a war that isn’t ours and in which we shouldn’t be involved?

After reading a post over at Des orques dans la brume, I have been keeping an eye on the health of our newborn beluga calf at the Vancouver Aquarium. Qila, the mother, is a first-timer, which always increases the risks. When the calf got sick last week, everyone took a deep breath. Having now mostly recovered, the two-week-old cutie is playfully swimming around her tank; updates are posted here and the mother and calf can be watched live on the beluga cam. Cute!

But just as it is the case out in open sea, the life and death cycle endlessly perpetuates itself at the aquarium too. And despite what some people want to believe, sometimes the human factor isn’t responsible. Animals, like us, just get sick and die. Period.

Exit Tag. The Vancouver Aquarium Stellar sea lion was 15 years old and died of... cancer! It’s a rather sad thing to imagine but he must have been treated kindly and provided the best care, so in the end, we probably made a difference on his illness.

Now the eternal debate remains. Aquariums, yes or no? I lean towards yes. Education of the public, to me, justifies a few caged, or tanked, animals - as long as living conditions are at their possible best and the aquarium is responsable and concerned with preservation, which isn’t always the case, sadly. Ours is, though, and I visit it somehow frequently, always amazed, always touched, always sad. Some of these creatures use to be swimming freely around me. It’s something one never forgets. It’s something one shouldn’t.

Less than 2 weeks ago, Mozilla released its latest marvel, Firefox 3. The new browser is sleeker than most and includes exciting new features like the Smart Location Bar and Color Management support. However an exhaustive list of all the cool features would take pages and I’ll leave it up to you to do your research. One thing I can tell you: if and when you switch to Firefox, you won’t come back, even if only because of its fantastic add-on architecture.

I’ve been having fun analyzing users habits and browser trends. It seems that Firefox users are generally much more aware of their browser’s capabilities and released updates, and to me that implies a different approach to the web and surfing. In other words, suddenly, I am thinking about tailoring my web design according to browsers in order to please a more targeted audience - and forgetting about the sacred rules of cross-browser compatibility, as it was suggested here. I wouldn’t go as far as dropping the ball completely for IE users and merely providing them with a laconic message like « Sorry. This site has been optimized for Firefox. Please switch browsers and come back later. » That would be fun, though. But I must admit that the bulk of my efforts with CSS and scripting is beginning to focus on Mozilla and forget about IE.

Let me throw a few figures at you to illustrate my point. Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001, buggy and messing with standard compliance; it was simply a bad browser and soon started losing ground to the new comer Firefox. 5 years later, in 2006, Microsoft unleashed IE7, hoping to stop the fall of its Windows-native browser. It failed. IE7 still cannot compete with Firefox, even if it did manage to regain some lost ground. But what’s interesting to me is that according to Google Analytics stats, 38% of my Internet Explorer visitors are still on IE6, 7 years after it was released and 2 years after a newer and better version came out.

Let’s look at Firefox. Version 2 rolled out in 2006. On June 17th, 2008, Firefox 3 was released in its final version. Yet, my stats show that 36% of my visitors are already using version 3, less than 2 weeks after its release. What does that say to me? They know what they want. They know what they don’t want. They’ll do something about it. My web site had better be polished otherwise they’ll go somewhere else.

« Well, but Firefox users probably do not yet represent such a large share of the crowd, » you might think. Think again. As of today, 45% of my visitors are using IE, 42% are on Firefox, 8% on Safari and the rest is negligible. Wow. The gap has been bridged.

Watching the web evolve these days is plain and simple fascinating. You need to be alert. Things are changing so fast blinking at the wrong time will make you miss a supernova. I can’t wait to see what unfolds next. And all isn’t pretty on that front. A US telecommunications policy debate is raging about the future of Net Neutrality. Now that’s scary.

But then again, there is no doubt that the internet is the next Superpower, and Superpowers will fight to death to control it.

This was found here

Or a list of the incredibly important areas school failed to address, leaving it up to me to find out about them, often painfully, always late.

1. Goals and focus. Sure we were given homework. Sometimes a helluva lot of it. But homework doesn’t really address itself. It overburdens a student into spending entire evenings or even nights fighting for some essay or a score but it never includes instructions. Students are left on their own figuring out how to properly manage their time, set priorities and achieve their goals, and most never do. They treat homework and school classes as annoyances, unavoidable pains that have to be endured until eventually freedom comes. Never are they told that freedom could be there this very day while doing homework, and that finishing school won’t yield any relief in life unless they have learned how to manage said life. A 1952 Yale study revealed that only 3% of the graduating class members had written goals. Twenty years later, another survey of the class indicated that the net worth of the 3% of the class that had written goals now exceeded the net worth of the other 97% of the class! That 3% also had statistically fewer divorces, and an overall better quality of life. Well, it’s just numbers. But those numbers presented by a great teacher with charisma and vision would sure as hell have made me think!
2. A healthy mind in a sane body. Was it once a week? We would go to the field and play team sports. I was also enrolled into a very intensive sports-study gymnastics program, which I hated because it was not about my own improvement or training; it was about, because and for competition. What I didn’t know, and it was never explained, is that there is no dichotomy of the mind-body machine. There are, among the average population, no brains on one side and muscles on the other, no one group mocking the other, unable to grasp or achieve the level of performance of their opposite. What there is, is a bunch of innocents who have been lead to believe they are better brains or better muscles, and that this simply has specialized them a little more and is quite acceptable. Bullshit! The mind cannot work without the body and vice versa. They both need to be in top shape. Keeping up that shape should be of the utmost importance throughout our life. And always, always, they should work and play together. Why was I never told that eating well would make me a better student? Why wasn’t it explained that more exercise would help me concentrate on homework? And why oh why didn’t they tell me that the mind has to be trained just as hard as the body? They implied it by forcing me to go to school. They just never said it!
3. Right and wrong. I was given plenty of wrongs, and a few rights. Wrong to be distracted in class. Wrong to be lazy. Wrong to chew gum. Wrong to be different. Wrong to fail an exam. Wrong to speak during class. Right to understand that all of these are wrong. Right to play the game. Right to be a good boy. But these are jokes. They have nothing to do with reality. The reality of our world is that all humans need a set of values. These values are acquired, they are not inherited. Human values define the world by defining us and so we should be educated towards values just as we are with biology and calculus. Values can be shaped into tools. Kids needs to learn why lying is wrong, not just told not to. They must be shown how to give. How to care. How to commit. How to be fair. How to be strong. Honest. Forgiving. Loving. Hardworking. Patient. How not to take themselves too seriously. Where else than school can one learn all this? After school, it’s too late. Habits have been taken, the mind has become lazy and sometimes already wandered to the dark side. But no, I was learning about sine and cosine. How very helpful that has proven to be.
4. Play the saxophone. My whole life would have been different. But, hey, they taught me to play the flute.
5. Love, fear and other foundations of life. As a kid in school, I was never told to look inside of me and face my demons. If anything, I was lectured that such demons didn’t exist. Be brave, they said. They meant for me to be quiet. Granted, adults who have not conquered their own fears cannot possibly teach about them. So we end up in a giant vicious circle. Still, as a child, I think I would have loved to learn more about my emotions. I would have enjoyed, with the curious and innocent morbidity of children, being lead to look into my own suffering, to venture towards the heart of my fears, and to explore the very taboo world of my young linkings and dislikes. I think that if it was explained properly, I could have understood much earlier that fear can be faced, and tamed. That it doesn’t have to govern our lives. And that love will fare so much better, when the fear is gone. School could have taught me about myself; instead, it chose to teach me about itself - an outdated, mostly useless and self-deprecating institution that manages only to waste a few precious years of very precious lives, wasting time on theory when so much practice is needed. Mr. Keating had it right; he got fired for it. Who will pick up the flame?

Still to come: « 5 great things I managed to learn any way. »

... Or a list of the worse absurdities years of traditional school have painfully engraved into my young mind, polluting it and wasting precious space and resources that could have been so much better used.

1. History. My ancestors were barbarians. From immemorial times, they have killed, plundered, coveted, destroyed and trashed. They have waged wars, endlessly, showing that greed and cruelty are two of mankind’s main assets. So to make sure all this History is retained and passed on, our education system rolls its students in it thoroughly, day after day, year after year, insuring they are properly branded and labeling them psychologically as the descendants of the beasts. We are told to be proud of the blood that stains our path. Never once is a moral judgment made on past actions. It’s all studied in the name of science, as a curiosity, as an ongoing experiment and a collection of dates and heroes - because no matter what they did to mankind, they are all famous. Napoleon, Hitler, Alexander the Great, Columbus, Socrates, Da Vinci, Attila, Custer, what’s the difference? Good, bad, they’re all historical figures, they make a speaker’s eye shine. Not once did a history teacher take a minute to pause the lesson and show us history repeating itself in the form of a present war, some unnecessary greedy killing for oil or money or diamonds, live, somewhere on the planet. Not once were we told that the butchers we are should become farmers. It’s not part of a history class. With only peaceful dates to remember, history teachers would be like a crowd without any sensationalistic newspapers to read. Bored.
2. Conformism. My first point leads to the second. History was taught, like every other topic, in carefully arranged classrooms, row after row of perfectly aligned tables and chairs. Every student had the same desk, the same books, in some cases the same uniform,
   « It is a miracle that curiosity survives the formal education. »
   Albert Einstein
   and uniform behaviour was expected. At the beginning of the year, the entire class would be sent out to buy the same exact supplies, no deviation allowed - type of pencils, color of binders, ruler size, everything was orchestrated to the smallest details, in the name of conformity. Then throughout the year, great efforts were made by the teachers to keep that conformity up. Vincent, can’t you do this like everybody else? Shame! As students we were being slowly trained to become perfect sheep, socially functioning mindless zombies with no desire for individuality, seeking only to belong and melt into the mass, finding approval and recognition from their peers by looking alike. Our society functions on mass control. Everything depends on how easy a population is to manipulate; politics, advertising, entertainment, fashion, retail, pharmacology, they all thrive on their ability to influence an audience via the media, convincing minds and hearts that they must do like everybody else in order to be happy and fulfilled; and all that started on my first day in school.
3. « Can do better ». One of the most common comment that appeared on the monthly student report sent to my parents was « Vincent is lazy. He has potential but could do better. » Given that I was usually in the top quarter of the class, I got used to it. It wasn’t bad. I was good, and probably could have been better. But my parents were satisfied with it because they focused on the word « potential » rather than « lazy ». God bless them. The school, however, never once bothered to teach me how to actually become better, how to use that potential. It never pushed me to go the extra mile, to leave the pack behind and do something greater, on my own. It had to stick with point 2. The teacher’s role was very simple: rate the students’ performance, write it down on a report and pass it on to the parents. Hands wiped, job over. The parents would mysteriously make it happen, they would use their parenthood to metamorphose this potential into a reality. But most parents see their kids less often than the school does, and they don’t have the opportunity to seriously educate their children socially - their education is family-oriented, and so it should be. It’s then left mostly to the schools to fit children into society. A society only progresses because of the remarkable efforts of very few. The majority of people are acting like a dead weight on evolution. It’s the few who pull us forward. Yet people in school never bothered to show me motivating examples of that leading pack of a few, to tell me I could make it there and be an architect of my own times. They merely said I could do better.
4. Play the flute. I wanted to play the bloody saxophone. What else can I say?
5. « School sucks ». We spend 10 to 20 years of our lives in some kind of school. It plays a major role into who we become as adults, and ultimately as shapers of our world. Yet there is overwhelming social acceptance that school years are among the worse we have or will go through. It is in school that we are taught the hard way to accept our faith silently and lower our heads, and do « it » because « it » has to be done. We then go into life and settle for more of the same; we accept less than perfect family situations, take a job we don’t like and go through our existence thinking there must be something better, without ever really seeking it. It doesn’t have to be that way. School must evolve into the best time of our life. It must become a real cradle, a place where creativity is unleashed and potential nurtured and exploited, a time during which kids have fun discovering who they are and what they will accomplish. Finding out about their differences and how those will serve the greater good by bringing in diversity. Learning about past mistakes and being shown how to correct them. Not allowed to settle for less than the best. School must change if we are to.

Coming next: « 5 things I wish school would have taught me instead » and « 5 great things I still managed to learn, in spite of all my laziness »

Sometimes, unaware, I catch myself complaining. It happened to me last night as I’d gone out to shoot the sunset. I was missing my bokkie. A stubborn layer of clouds was obstructing MY horizon and dimming what I had hoped would be an explosion of airborne colors. And there were too many people on MY beach - well behaved, mostly quiet and enjoying a beautiful end to the day, but too many of them. So I snapped a few pictures and went back home without touching the fancy drink I had brought for myself, and which I drank sitting next to MY balcony instead - not on it because the bloody pigeons are winning the battle and covering it with an effective layer of guano. Effective, I say, because it turns the balcony into a stinky minefield for me, and a happy playing and breeding ground for them. Whoever was criticizing pigeon-dislike recently should be tied up and rolled into said layer until he understands the ridiculous stink of his pompously futile discourse.

But then, at home, sipping on my Ice Bet while I glanced at the sunset pictures which turned out to be quite nice, it suddenly dawned on me that I was an idiot. Yes, you might have known that about me for a long time, but for my part I frequently lose sight of such a trivial fact. There I was, bitching about nothing and less, standing in the middle of a little paradise, my mind filled with the presence of a beautiful freckled angel.

Understand this: I live in an extraordinary place. From my balcony, I see the ocean. The beach is located exactly half a block away. In the morning, I am woken up by the cry of seagulls. If I walk lazily 10 minutes further, I get to a park that is arguably North America’s largest urban green space, and certainly the most stunning. From home, I have 30 km of uninterrupted waterfront running/biking paths available to soothe both bored pleasure and addicted running needs. So my nearly daily encounters while running are raccoons, swans, harbour seals, turtles, eagles and balanced stones. A little over an hour by public transit takes me to bear country, lush temperate rain forests, wooden suspension bridges, pristine mountain streams and peaks that remain snow-capped most of the year. Killer whales are roaming not too far to the south. Cougars to the north. Yet within five minutes from home I have groceries, liquor, drugs, food, movies, transport and restaurants. I can walk to work in 35 minutes. Actually, there’s nowhere downtown I can’t walk to. And there are flowers everywhere.

Yet I bitch. Is it human nature to always want more? Probably so. And to be honest, I will soon get it. But the fact remains, this.is.extraordinary. So I do my best to cool my head and appreciate it all as one does of an ephemeral bloom, long awaited, sudden, intense and so short-lived, yielding its glory to the distant glow of memories and expectations of what’s to come next, all over again. The seeds will have traveled to new grounds. The bloom is always different. The awe remains.

Despite being dead tired I can’t sleep so I might as well write maybe my fingers will get sleepy and drag the rest of me to bed today I learned that medicine has a name for that annoying feeling people get in their legs sometimes which isn’t really painful but bugs the hell out of them and keeps them awake for hours counting sheep they call it RLS Restless Leg Syndrom I’m having RMS Restless Mind Syndrom man it sucks I tried banging it against a wall but it sounded empty and I was afraid to break right through it the wall not the head you know how they build modern apartments a couple of layers of sheetrock and you’re in the neighbour’s flat his head would be priceless if mine the head not the wall suddenly blasted into his space and stared at him in his underwear so any way I stopped and now I am using a softer approach because I am smart and I am afraid of my neighbour but tonight I cooked I had a great recipe given to me by my mentor along with detailed instructions which I followed closely but it didn’t go as planned first I had to find the kitchen and that’s difficult because my place is messy but I remembered that it’s like night diving and if you look behind you once in a while you will find your way back and I did and there was the kitchen I took all the ingredients out of the fridge but put them back so that I could remember where the leftovers would fit once I was very stressed by the cooking and then I got the board it’s like an ironing board but without the legs and harder and I started chopping up mushrooms and I remembered how I cut my finger last week it was while cutting mushrooms because there was dried blood left on the board and I was more careful this time that knife is sharp as a knife and then I stabbed my hand with a garlic head trying to crack it open like my mentor but it was pointy and now there’s more blood on the board but I’m not worried because garlic disinfects and I sliced it and also some parsley just because and I mixed the eggs too but not too much this was not an hamlet it was scrambled eggs so no frothing and by then the pan was hot so I started with the mushrooms and the garlic slowly with butter I love butter I wonder if there is a club and when the garlic was getting cooked I poured the egg mix and the greens and that’s when it all became tricky because the last time I had made an hamlet but involuntarily so I had to reduce the heat on the stove but then nothing was happening and major wobbling continued so I increased the heat and still nothing and then more heat and it started happening and then it happened too fast and the bottom stuck to the pan and the wobbling was gone and I had to rescue the meal and put it on two toasts because that’s the only bread I had and it was 2 weeks old but without green stuff growing on it so I ate it with my eggs on top but more like a broken hamlet that tasted good but looked like shit.

This is for Marie, who could not be present, but always is, any way.

There are times and places when - and where - one wishes the former would stop and the latter could be taken home. But time surely never stops and those places only follow us home on frozen photographs and wrapped up softly in our memories. It’s up to us, then, to match our pace to that of life around us and to make sure the memories live on and generate new dreams.

The Seawall is one of those places, and last Sunday night, one of those times.

I had noticed on my afternoon run that Kent Avery, the singular man behind the famous balanced stones, was at work on his regular spot half-way between Ferguson Point and Second Beach, and I’d decided to come back for sunset.

When I arrived, the sun was just dipping lazily behind the gentle mountains across English Bay, leaving us with nothing but a cloudless sky and a palette of colors that were still too dull to exploit. I would have to be patient.

As I was slowly setting Abe up on the tripod, a man rushed past me, headed towards the city, and said: « If you hurry up and turn around, there’s barely enough light left to get a shot of this. » He was pointing at the moon. I smiled to myself and muttered: « Dude, you have no idea how wrong you are. The light hasn’t even appeared yet. »

Kent was still around, balancing two last stones near the water’s edge. Eventually, seemingly satisfied with his work for the day, he came over and started talking with passers-by. After glancing at my camera, he asked in a melancholic tone: « Did you ever use Kodachrome? » It said nothing but said it all. I replied that I had been more of a Fujichrome fan and the conversation picked up. We talked about good old times vs the new, about the Photoshop lab we now have at home and about the ever-lasting need to still get it right from the start, in-camera. He mentioned he was working on a book of photos of his art and stories he’d accumulated during nine years of « being around ».

People were walking past us, commenting out loud, in admiration. « They look like little people » said someone. « I can’t understand how come they don’t fall down right away » added another. « This is so peaceful » said a small girl that could not have been older than 10 or 12. True, there was a peculiar stillness in the air and the balanced stones seemed suspended in space, defying gravity and our very understanding, as if painted unto the scenery and as such, immortal. They would, however, be short-lived. Tides and the wind have been making sure to keep Kent coming back week after week, and he does.

I was in no hurry to shoot anything, and neither was he. I knew that the magic was probably going to happen after most people had given up and gone home. There are, really, two golden hours. One is the painters’ favourite, late afternoon, when a low sun washes over a scene in warm orange tones and long shadows. The other is the photographer’s, or maybe just mine. The sun has already disappeared below the world, light is evening itself out, shadows give way to richer midtones, and if one is lucky, the sky puts up its most amazing display of colors as the sun’s rays are still reaching far up into the atmosphere. It’ll happen anywhere between a few minutes after sunset and a good hour later. As a rule of thumb, when people are getting chilly and leaving and I wonder what to do, I stay. It usually pays off.

As time passed, the Seawall was emptying itself of its human fleas. Darkness was gaining on a long day. People were fewer and fewer. At last, the light changed. Subtle nuances emerged in the sky and calm water by the shore began flirting with them. Abe came to life on her pedestal.

XXXX

It was getting late. Kent had finished taking shots of his open air temple on a small digital point-and-shoot and took leave. « Come by and show me your pictures some day, he said. » I was about to ask him where his office was when I remembered I was standing in it. « Sure, I replied, ‘be glad to. » Even he might be a little surprised by the results. It’s hard to believe that in the almost complete darkness which reigns an hour after sunset, so much light still exists for the sensor to record.

At such long exposure settings, the game is one of patience, of trial and error. Reciprocity failure kicks in and makes any precise calculations pretty much impossible. But nothing about Sunday night’s conditions was precise. It was the romantic hour, a time for fantasies and visions and dreams, for drifting thoughts and longing unleashed. I had to see the colors with my inner eye, the real ones having gone almost blind as Abe, even in manual focus and with my guidance, struggled to find her crisp edge.

And there, unavoidably, as the shots were stacking up unto the memory card and a silent night had fallen on the Seawall, I found myself connecting, to other places and different times, to memories and paths and directions, to the absent one who ought to have been standing there next to me, and soon would be, somehow, somewhere.