January 19, 2012: Kodak Declares Bankruptcy

Medifast Status: Day 261, Down ~73lbs

Finally, I am caught back up on SGL!

We all saw it coming for years and knew that they were working on the filing recently but officially today Eastman Kodak files for bankruptcy protection.  I find it unlikely that Kodak will ever rise again.  They have been on a downward spiral for so long that bankruptcy protection is not going to help them.  They have had a decade to reorganize and find a way to make money.  Now they are just buying time.  The end is near.

It is odd having grown up in Rochester, New York and being a child of Eastman Kodak.  Kodak was a massive part of my childhood.  Kodak defined the Rochester skyline that we could see from my childhood home.  My father worked there from the time that he left college until he retired.  I did my first competition photography with the Kodak Camera Club in the summer of 1986.  I took many photography classes there in the nineties.  I did my second engineering job at a company that partially made products for Kodak.  I did my first IT “job” at Kodak, a short week or two week intern thing when I was thirteen.  I considered going to work for Kodak Canada in the mid-nineties.

Rochester is not the same town that it once was and never will be again.  Kodak was a product of another era and that era is very much over.  Already people have little memory as to what Kodak even was and no one understands just how powerful film manufacturing was during that era.  Kodak changed the world, but the world moved on without it.

I was in the office today after being home again yesterday.  This morning Dominica made a run to CostCo to go shopping.  She got a ton of stuff.  Loads of coffee, some new clothes, lots of food.  She found some amazingly tempting maple glazed pecans.  Those are just evil.  And she found some cool Korean seaweed snacks.

I went home for lunch.  We ate salads and watched two episodes of How I Met Your Mother.  Liesl was being weird and wanted to take a bath so I drew that for her.  Then back to the office.

I ended up working until nearly six and then went home and hung out with the girls.  We had a nice evening.  Liesl loves making me play “ring around the rosey” over and over and also likes to play “stop / go”.  Luciana stood up on her own for the first time tonight.  I was sitting in my arm chair in the play room and she crawled over to me and just lifted herself up.  After doing it that first time she did it several more times on the ottoman in the play room much to Dominica’s chagrin who now as an extremely dangerous near-toddler to deal with around the house.

We watched How I Met Your Mother this evening and we finished the fourth season and have now watched an episode or two of the fifth season.  We really love that show.

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