... Or so it seems.

This is the chemist that I go to when given a script by my doctor, which has been far too frequently in the last couple of years.

The latest thing was the (stop reading if you're having breakfast) re-inflammation of a cyst on the back of my neck which has been cursing me for the last decade or so, and which has flared up yet again. It therefore needed to be drained (again; and isn't that fun, in the same way that having a sharp nail hammered into your neck is), then packed, and will need to be re-packed tomorrow at 80 bucks per pop in doctor's bills. (Though you get about $35 back from Medicare, and when he has to perform a procedure like that I don't begrudge him a cent of it.) And in the meantime, there are the antibiotics which are almost part of my diet now.

This section of Pitt Street does date back to the year shown. (The year appears again as a moulding on the front of the building, just under the roof along with an image of a phoenix. Why a phoenix? The company's previous Pitt St store had burnt to the ground and this one rose from its ashes.)

Although a lot of Pitt Street has been bulldozed and rebuilt as mega shopping malls (in some cases repeatedly) some of the late Victorian buildings in this part of Pitt St have remained and been restored. Given the vintage of the building I felt that it was time to reacquaint myself with the art of sepia adjustments. Which I have of course done before, but this time I used a slightly different method from a tip that I'd read. Black is of course simply black, and largely unaffected by a sepia adjustment. So before applying it I also applied a curves adjustment layer to remap the pure blacks into greys, which ARE affected by the adjustment.

Either that or I hopped into the DeLorean, fired up the flux capacitors and headed back to 1886 to take this shot with contemporary equipment, I can't remember which. Hey, if you felt like you'd had a nail hammered into your neck you'd have a hard time remembering which too.

Last Year