Old school photography

 The other day, for no good reason, I got thinking about film and old school cameras. When I was a kid my dad had a pretty good collection of old cameras and shot a fair amount of 120 type film.

If you've never used 120 film it's around 60mm wide, so nearly twice the width of the more common 35mm stuff. It comes open on reels and requires a little skill to handle.

Interestingly it's still being made, so I ordered some:

I ordered from B&H Photo in New York but it's available from a lot of different places. This is all brand new film, that one on the end has "vintage packaging".

When we came back from our last trip to camp we stopped at my parent's house to snag a camera. Unfortunately it would appear the collection has been packed away somewhere. I did find this: 

It's a Kodak No.2A Brownie. The line started in 1907, the 2A was made from 1920 to 1924, so right around 100 years ago. It was my great grandmother's, unfortunately we don't know any more of the story than that. At the start of 1920 she was already married with 2 kids and a third on the way.

Unfortunately this camera uses 116 film which is a little wider (and longer) than 120. It's possible to respool 120 film onto 116 spools or to fit 120 spools into a 116 camera with adapters. It's also possible to buy bulk 116 film and fit it into a 116 spool.

For the moment I think what I'm actually going to do is buy another camera. They made millions of 120 cameras, they're not particularly rare or expensive. At some point I'll probably revisit this Brownie, stay tuned...

Things have escallated

 Oh the joys of working on a 100+ year old house.

For my next magical trick I decided I ought to jack up the enclosed porch, it had a case of the sags...

It's hard to tell from the picture but it sags to the front and to the center. The sag had then caused the step under the door to tip in which let water in and rotted the step out.

I started jacking under the left side, the corner in the front of the picture. That went pretty well, I've done work like this before and we have the right equipment for the job.

This is the "small" jack, it's a 4 ton unit, handy for these kind of jobs because it's short. We've also got a 6 ton that is a little beefier and a massive 12 ton for big jobs.

It's important to put a piece of scrap lumber between the jack and what you're jacking to prevent these kind of problems. However this was just a symptom of a larger issue.

That south end of the porch was just rotted away to nothing. The beam was a 6"x6"...

The last couple feet of the beam were still good so I opted to keep it. I went underneath and added a 4 foot section of 2"x8" and then put 174" of 2x8 to replace what we had removed.

With 6x6 beams in short supply I opted to use 4x 2x8s to make up the thickness. They match up nicely to the beam that remains while being a little bit taller.

The porch sits on these pipes. I think the screw part was an attempt to make the height adjustable but years of sitting outside have seized the threads. We ended up cutting off the part sticking above the pipe.

I cut these plates to go between the pipes and the wood to keep the pipes from pushing up into the wood. They're 4" wide and 7.5" long to distribute the load. I'm not sure of the thickness, probably 1/8", less than 1/4" certainly. For now they're just held in place by gravity but I probably should tack weld them to the pipes, they're kind of annoying to handle while jacking up the house.

The trim boards came apart when I removed them so I made new ones, they're just 1x6. The new step is 2x8 left over from the beam replacement. It fits perfectly for height. I had to cut away more on the right than the left to get rid of some rot. In retrospect I should have made it go all the way under the trim boards. I may revisit this again later, I was fighting rain and just wanted to get the job done. You can see we'll need to replace some flooring at some point in the future.

We had just a little paint left over after painting the house so I slapped it into the new work to protect it for the winter.

Also on the list for this trip but not photographed were a new light in the kitchen. The thing that was there hung on a chain right at head level so it had to go. I also finally replaced the door handle on the screen door. The inside handle was broken which made getting out a tricky proposition. Finally I put in a couple screws where the screen door was broken. The previous occupant had "fixed" it with tape. Maybe in October I'll take it apart and glue it for a better repair.

A good way to use up zucchini

 It's that time of year again where if you leave your car unlocked somebody might put a bunch of zucchini inside.

We somehow ended up with a bunch of zucchini plants this year and of course a bunch of zucchini. I usually try to pick 'em when they're small but that doesn't always work out and of course we end up with a bunch of big ones. What to do? Angie made some zucchini bread but even that gets old after awhile. Then I remembered back to an idea I tried during the Coleman cooking challenge, zucchini boats...

I got a couple of those big zucchini, sliced in half and carved out the seeds. I left a plug at each end to keep them as boats. I got rid of the seeds but kept a little of the pulp. Then I grilled them a little bit. This step softens them and gets some of the water out.

We've also got a lot of venison sausage so I fried up a pound of that with some chopped mushrooms, red peppers, tomatoes and the pulp from the zucchini. I also added some pasta sauce to the mix.

I rushed and it ended up really wet, I should have cooked the veggies (especially the tomatoes) first. So I added some ground up cornbread stuffing which dried things out nicely. Then I added the sausage filling to the boats.

And covered in shredded mozzarella cheese.

Each boat was a good meal for one person so we had these for dinner and lunch the next day. I probably should have grilled the boats a little more, the drier they are at the start the easier they will be to eat.