Monthly Archives: December 2024

November in Black and White

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I already have more hobbies than I have time for—the majority of them get exactly zero attention, most of the time—so this fall, I thought to myself, “Why not add another?” With that mantra in mind, I decided to explore film photography. You can see the results here.

I’ve always been a little bit interested in photography, long before I had the slightest understanding how it worked. Some of my oldest memories are of my dad rearranging the lamps in our living room and fiddling with a light meter to set up for Christmas portraits. On early family vacations, I toted around an old Kodak Instamatic that took 126 film. And on later trips, I took a drugstore pocket camera that shot 110 film—I probably still have that camera in a box somewhere.

But that was pretty much it until Julie and I got married: my college and grad school years are almost completely undocumented photographically, except for visits to my parents. Before our wedding in the year 2000, I bought an Advanced Photo System (APS) camera to take on our honeymoon, thinking that would set us up for the long haul. Smart, prescient move.

That was the end of my film photography journey until this November when, on a whim, I bought a roll of Tri-X, put it into an old Canon SLR I bought on eBay a few years back (the last time this impulse hit me), and just started taking pictures. I’m not an especially skilled photographer—these shots were taken using automatic focus in aperture priority mode—but I was pleased with the results nonetheless. They’re mostly candid shots of my family and the neighborhood, subject matter that’s inherently appealing to me, and the experience left me eager to find opportunities to explore further.

Gallery: November in Black and White

Wong Family 1947

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As I was going through my Mom’s album of family photos from the 70s and 80s, I came across an envelope tucked between the pages. I was delighted to find that it contained a collection of medium format slides that seemed mostly pretty well-preserved. I don’t have the equipment required to scan slides this large, so I packaged them up and sent them off to ScanCafe—ironically, all the way back to Illinois, where these slides sat for decades before I carted them off to California—to be digitized.

I was delighted with the resulting images. The slides contained photos of my father, his mother, father, paternal grandparents, and three of his brothers; his four other brothers hadn’t been born yet. Some of the pictures were formal portraits, which allowed me to date them to 1947: they conveniently included a calendar and a clock as part of the setting. Others featured Dad and his brothers boxing in a basement and what Dad thinks might be one of his uncles’ cars outside the laundry his grandparents ran.

I took home a couple additional albums when we returned from our Christmas visit to Elk Grove Village this year. I don’t expect to find anything as surprising as these pictures inside them, but anything’s possible: if I’ve learned one lesson over the last year, it’s that my mother loved to stash things in unexpected places.

Gallery: Wong Family 1947

Last Walkathon

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This year’s Booksin Walkathon was bittersweet: it marked William’s last as a student and our last as a family. Our first was all the way back on October 10, 2009, when Julia was in kindergarten:

Hailey and Julia at the Booksin Walkathon in 2009

This was our thirteenth Walkathon. Starting with our first in 2009, we didn’t miss a year until 2017, when Joe had moved on to middle school and William was still in preschool. We picked our streak up again in 2018, but lost a couple years to the pandemic and bad air quality. In the end, we’ve spent a lot of hours over the last decade-and-a-half listening to music and watching hundreds of kids walk in circles in the sun. Naturally, we have pictures of this year’s festivities.

This year, William went in with a mission: he wanted to earn the top prize, an LED-adorned, light-up frisbee, which would require him to walk 20 miles over the course of the five-hour event. This would make him the first Wong to reach the highest prize tier: neither Julia nor Joe ever pulled that off, which would have required 25 miles in their day (though they would have had a couple extra hours to reach that milestone).

William had never come particularly close before: the lure of chasing friends around the playground was always too strong. But he told us weeks ahead of time that he was committed to making it happen this time around, so we let him skip his soccer game so he wouldn’t miss two critical hours. We arrived at school in plenty of time for him to be ready at the start (Julie had already been there for a couple hours, running the registration desk), and he walked or ran more or less the entire time, stopping only for bathroom breaks and to grab a hot dog for lunch. In the end, he made it to his goal with a little under 15 minutes to spare and, exhausted, claimed some well-earned rewards. Julie and Julia were there at the finish line to congratulate him as they wrapped up shifts punching lap cards.

Thus concludes our Booksin Walkathon story. William will most likely want to return as an alumni walker at some point, and he may work some volunteer shifts to fulfill high school graduation requirements, but our days of dedicating an entire Saturday in October to celebrating the Booksin community are behind us.

Gallery: Last Walkathon