Where did we leave off? I hate using this medium to pro­vide details of my per­sonal life, but just so we’re all on the same page: Octo­ber has been a busy month! I have a new job, which has been good so far. I have some new social arrange­ments. And a cou­ple of days ago I signed the lease for my new apart­ment, a lovely place which is the prod­uct of years of inde­ci­sion about mov­ing cou­pled with a long search for the per­fect pad. Frankly, I’m excited, but I don’t move in until Decem­ber 1.

Last week­end I vis­ited Amrys in lovely Madi­son. I didn’t get the per­fect Wis­con­sin weather—it rained for much of Sat­ur­day and snowed the same evening—but we had a blast any­way. I attended a superb lec­ture by William “the wiz­ard” Cronon (author of Changes in the Land), sipped fine local brews with a bunch of grad stu­dents in the cav­ernous beer hall at the Stu­dent Union, went to a real Wis­con­sin fish fry, drank a Brandy Old-Fashioned, toured the mag­nif­i­cent State House, tra­versed the Arbore­tum grounds, and more. It was great to spend time with an old friend again. And I’m sup­posed to encour­age all of you to get off your asses and visit. Madi­son is a ter­rific city too.

Back in Boston there has been no short­age of enter­tain­ment. Ben and Kristy threw a nice din­ner party at their new place the other night. That was a good time, even if only I and Ron Bur­gundy man­aged to show up. I also dropped by a Hal­loween party in which Mar and Tay­lor were immac­u­lately dressed as the main char­ac­ters from the Hud­sucker Proxy, which I thought was brilliant.

In photo news: I went to Pho­to­graph­ica 2006 today. I picked up much-needed yel­low and orange fil­ters for my Leica on the cheap. Some other guy was sell­ing fil­ters for the Widelux, but he wanted a ridicu­lous $250 for them (“You see if you can find them for sale any­where!”) and he was a huge ass­hole (“Show me the color of your money and then we can talk”). So yeah, I didn’t buy those. On an exper­i­men­tal basis, I’ve secretly switched my ordi­nary devel­oper with Folger’s Crys­tals. Or rather, Kodak XTOL. Yes, it’s dif­fer­ent, but it will take me a few dozen rolls to get a han­dle for whether I like it bet­ter than my old standby, Ilford DD-X. The pic­tures on this page today were devel­oped in XTOL and I’m not thrilled with how they came out, so some process adjust­ments are prob­a­bly in order.

I have a zil­lion pic­tures in the queue and not a lot of time to dig­i­tize them (or print them, for that mat­ter). But I hope to have a few more images to share in the near future.

And yeah, I’ll redesign this page at some point too.