... I have some catching up to do.

This image is being posted on Monday 25 April; so a month and a bit after it was taken. In between times I have of course been neglecting PBase prodigiously, while working 65 to 70 hour weeks which are gradually tapering down to about 60 hours per week. I was actually cruising quite well at the start of this budgeting cycle until I developed a cough just before Good Friday which saw me spending most of that day in the Bulli Hospital Emergency Department (or what's left of it; it's really just a primary care facility now) on Ventolin and having chest x-rays to rule out pneumonia. Anyway, a couple of courses of antibiotics and many inhaler uses later I'm starting to get back to normal, more or less.

But this image predated all of that. There is a building at the rear of the Corrimal car wash which has had a very chequered history. It has tried to be a drive-through Cafe. It has tried to be a drive-through fried chicken place. Neither of these aspirations have turned out well.

Recently it was refurbished as a bakery and deli. It's in a rather inconspicuous location even though it is directly alongside the old highway. I'm not sure how many people are likely to stop by for breakfast, though apparently they also supply as wholesalers, which may end up working for them. When I was taking this shot a woman who co-owns the place came over and asked me what I was taking it for. I tried to explain the concept of a PAD. Not that this one is such an animal, strictly speaking, but you know, in theory. She gave me a copy of the menu which I had hoped to include extracts from but I can't place my hands on it at the moment.

I tend not to remember street names very much. I remember the patterns of streets and roads rather than the names so I had no idea why they had elected to put up a mural of Albert Einstein on the wall of their bakery. Then it was pointed out to me that the side street that the car wash sits on is Albert Street. There probably isn't a more famous Albert (sorry, Schweitzer), so it all suddenly made sense.

The other reason that I have some catching up to do with Albert? The previous day I had updated the firmware settings of the Olympus. When, this morning, I went to download all of the photos that I have taken since I took this one I noticed that they came onto the computer blisteringly fast. That should have been a warning sign. Yes, that's right, when I updated the firmware it trashed all of my settings and I was back to shooting JPEG's in the sRGB colour space instead of raw images in the Adobe colour space. Also, I noticed that I had failed to reset the clock after we went off daylight savings over Easter. Perhaps if I had time to use the camera more often I would have noticed these things sooner. Oh well, no matter; the Olympus doesn't do a bad job even with JPEG's and sRGB.

Edit, August 2023: The "Bakery" sign was still on the building as at November 2016, according to Google Street View. By June 2017 it had been painted over, so sadly my prediction came to pass. As far as I know there has not been a business in there since. Some time between March 2021 and June 2022 someone thought it would be a really good idea to paint the building white. The Albert mural is still there... but let's just say that it doesn't exactly "pop" against a while background the way it does here. Maybe whoever came up with the idea can decide to paint the background of the Mona Lisa white as well, just to freshen it up, y'know?