I used to live in this house:

I Used to Live Here

In fact, this was my front door:

At One Time, My Front Door

Those two photos are recent. The door is still very large, as I remember it to be. When I lived here, at 7 Pritchatts Road, Edgbaston, Bimingham, UK, it rained every day. One day it stopped long enough to do this:

Edgbaston Rainbow

That photo is not recent because it was taken when I lived there, which was almost ten years ago.

Birmingham is difficult for me because I like it okay but it does not like me. For one thing, when I lived there, it rained every day. Did I mention that? It is actually not an exaggeration. I got over that, but then when I finally made it back for a “hey, Brum, what’s up?” visit this past June, it pulled a fast one on me. My good friend Matt (bless him for tolerating me) and I were walking around central Birmingham—which is nothing, nothing like it used to be, in a very positive way—. I took a photo, this one actually:

The last photo...

And then I dropped my camera. I won’t try to explain that, but it happened. You can see that the ground in the photo is made of hard, and even the normally introverted passersby exclaimed and there was also some gasping. That was the end of photographing Europe for me. I spent the rest of the day trying to act like I didn’t want to die or roll around on the ground crying. Poor Matt.

It took me two or three weeks after getting home even to face the grief of sending my Canon 5D Mark II body back to Canon for repair. That went okay, but then I let myself slowly realize that my main workhorse lens, a 17-40mm, was making really off-putting grinding noises and when you tilted it a certain way, you could actually hear some small and doubtless expensive thing bouncing around inside. So far it has been in the shop for two weeks and I haven’t even received an estimate yet.

Yes. I should follow up. But it is just so enervating.

This is mostly why I lost my blogging habit this summer. I hope I can restore it. I feel bad.