That sure didn’t last long.

On Friday afternoon, Kathleen and I went out to Hintonburg for Vegans Who Snack, a food and arts festival held at (and around) the Parkdale Market monthly throughout the summer. It’s quite popular and very busy, a testament to the demand for the food, the delights of getting together, lovely crafts and that Ottawa has very few dedicated vegan restaurants, so it’s not always clear when going out whether we’ll be able to have anything on the menu.

Fortunately, many of the vendors at the festival are restaurants, so if they’re there, we at least know that their menus have something for us! ☺️🌱

While the sun was very hot, we made sure to stay in the shade. We had the elote hot dog from Sausage Party TO, squares of strawberry and apple fritter focaccia from Sweets and Treats (Sweets by Natalia), peach basil tea mocktails from Nurture with Botanics, and we chose a potato chip “Rice Krispie” bar and blueberry confetti cake cookie sandwich from Little Jo Berry’s.

Oh, and since I was a bit of a dum-dum and didn’t spot the Moo Shu booth while we were there, we finish our visit with a stop at their shop nearby (on the way back to the bus), where I had a vegan dalgona and coffee cone and Kathleen had a vegan vanilla bean, roasted pear, and fudge cone while we sat in the shade and waited for our bus.

There was just one thing that I found bothersome about the evening.

Equipment Failure is Never Welcome

The camera I got myself as a sort of “post-surgical” gift, the Pentax ME Super, decided that the film transport problems that it showed on some self-rolled FP4+ two weeks ago was indeed a real film transport issue (and not a matter of me over-rolling).

It seems to be the case that any 36-frame roll where the film base is thicker than the marginally-thinner one Kodak uses for its consumer colour negative film (Gold, ColorPlus, Ultramax), then it’s likely that the camera will jam up and refuse to advance the film at some point.

In the case of the roll I had loaded for our little afternoon adventure, It began complaining at the ninth frame and, in spite of my efforts (rolling back, resuming, etc.), there was no way that it was going to want to pass a certain mark in the film. The last long photo above is the six-frame run where I tried to get things going again.

Admittedly, I haven’t had a lot of good luck in the last year where cameras are concerned. Historically, I’ve had good luck on eBay, where I purchase from sellers with 99.6% positive reviews (or greater) and who otherwise seem reputable, transparent, and honest about the item they’re selling. Most of the time, it’s comparatively low dollar value, which generally makes returns not worth seeking, but still.

After this failure, I believe I am finished with purchasing second-hand from individuals and from eBay-only vendors. I’ve seen chatter that suggests that the stock of old film cameras out there is beginning to dwindle somewhat – at least in comparison to what things looked like 5, 10 years ago, and this seems to match what I am seeing.

Still, I have enough working 35mm cameras to keep myself busy for a while, but I just don’t know if I’ll have the luxury of choosing from different systems in the same way.

As I noted before, I have just one more camera purchase in mind: I’m saving for a Fuji GW690iii. Now the only challenge will be that eBay is numerous Japanese sellers offering these cameras in the price range I’m thinking ($1,500 – $1,800), but I have to admit, I would very much prefer to purchase one from a brick-and-mortar seller in Canada who offers a little bit of a warranty.

Unfortunately, while the sellers I am familiar with do that, I’ve yet to see that particular camera show up for sale!

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