scanner madness

All I did today was scan old photos. All day long.  I really enjoyed it, though, so that was okay. And it poured rain all day long too, so I didn’t have any desire to leave the house. I have quite a few old family photos in frames, and a bunch of the ones I really love are in collage frames, so I tackled those. That was a lot of work, because the photos of course don’t fit the collage holes at all, being very old, so I’d done all sorts of improvising to get them to look okay. Scanning them meant taking them out of the frames which was an ordeal. So was getting them back in. And I can see from here that I didn’t do a very good job getting some of them back in, but oh well.  I figured it would be best to do those now while I’m still all gung-ho about scanning. I know my ADD Gemini brain – I’ll get tired of it and move on to some other project before long. The ones in frames are my favorites, too.

The scanner is really fast, even doing a pretty high resolution scan, and I was uploading them to Flickr as I went, and that was fast too. It’s SO much better than the old scanner, which took forever even at a lower quality scan. And you couldn’t do anything else while scanning – with this one, you can use other programs while it scans. But it scans so fast you don’t need to.

This may give me something to write about for awhile that doesn’t involve whining about my job/coworkers. I thought it might make me melancholy to do this, but it really hasn’t. Of course, I’m not thinking too much about them either. I kind of got Old Picture Melancholy Overload after my aunt died and I ended up with a bunch of old ones I’d never seen. So I do try not to get on that "Oh, they were so young and having so much fun and now they’re DEAD!!!" train of thought.

So, here ya go!

This is one of my favorite pictures of my father. I’m not sure what he was doing, but he looks like he’s carrying his lunch in that bag. I think this might be up on the hill behind their house. It’s somewhere around there, I’m sure.

Another favorite of Daddy – I don’t know what they were doing here either, but they look like they were up to no good. That’s his friend Earl Shope – or Edgar? I forget, there was Earl and there was Edgar. One died before I was born and I remember the other one as this really silent old guy who still lived with his mother in an old house not far from us. I think Daddy was amused that we’d named our kitten Edgar. But I love their cool slouches and their cigarettes. Baker B says my father looks like Syd Barret in this photo, the Pink Floyd guy who went nuts. Also amusing as my father was about as un-Pink-Floyd-crazy as it gets.

This may be my favorite picture ever. In fact, I posted this one a number of years ago when someone asked me what my favorite picture ever was. That was before I lost my Picturetrail account. But I think this may be it.

This is Daddy’s brother HL, who was about seven years older than Daddy, and the next to oldest of the six kids. I love how dashing he was, and also how the picture is all tilted sideways and it’s a very nice composition, and I’m sure that was completely accidental. That’s the house they grew up in behind him, and my grandfather way back in the background. And I think someone’s finger got in the way. I even like that.

I grew up in a house about halfway up the hill behind the tree in the middle, which isn’t there yet. If you were standing where the photographer is now, you’d see 9 or 10 houses.

This is three of my aunts – including Cousin E’s mother – and my mother on the end, on the right. I have always thought they were at the beach in this picture, but I don’t really know that’s true. They’re kind of dressed up to be at the beach – and I just realized that’s someone’s picture on the window sill. Why would they have someone’s picture at a motel room? This is probably not really the beach. I think I got that idea because there are so many pictures of all of them at Daytona. And it does look like they’re having a lot of fun, wherever they are.

And finally, all the kids. Daddy is fourth from the left. He and Mabel, beside him, have the exact same expression. Everyone else is kind of looking at the ground. Jean, on the end, looks like she’s trying not to laugh. I’m sure that’s my grandfather’s shadow, with the hat. Taking the picture. Maybe my grandmother is the other shadow. They’re standing in the road in front of their house. Obviously there wasn’t as much traffic on that road then as there is now.

And that’s enough for tonight.