Saturday, December 10, 2005

My God, It's Full of Slides!

I've been working a lot on sorting out all my slides. I started Tuesday night and went through roughly 25 rolls, as I mentioned in my post on Wednesday night to Thursday. I was up until 1am Wednesday morning doing it, using the little slide table and paying half attention to several old episodes of CSI that happened to be on the Tivo. Wednesday night I spent doing some "research" (I was, in fact, looking up some information about various thing, such as solar hot water) and posting; didn't get to bed until after 12.

Thursday night, I went back through all the slides I had decided to throw out, using the loupe and the large light table I borrowed from Rick. I did wind up deciding to keep a few of them, but not many. Getting them back into the right boxes was a pain in the neck. Not that leaning over the slide table for 4 hours was any less. I also got through most of the rest of the rolls of slides, but wound up finishing a couple on Friday night and the last several this morning. The only reason I didn't do the last 12-ish on Thursday night was that it was already a bit after midnight and my neck was bugging me.

Friday night I didn't do any, because our friend Chris came to visit. Chris signed back up with the reserves and hooked up with a unit out of Dublin. He'll be doing IT/IS management and prep, helping other units get ready to deploy. I'm glad that this helps minimize the likelihood that he will be deployed. Chris had a bit of an adventure getting here. We decided it would be best for him to take BART and us to pick him up. He calls me when he's on the train, I figure when that means he'll hit the closest station and we head over there at that time. We're two blocks from the station when my phone rings... it's Chris. Umm... I'm in Fremont. Oops. Someone steered him to the wrong train and he wasn't paying enough attention and by the time he realized what was up, he was stuck.

OK. So, we went home again, ordered some food from a nice Mediterranean place near by and then Rachel and I went to get the food and then Chris while Dawn stayed home to set the table and get things ready. This time it all worked pretty well. Had a devil of a time finding parking near the restaurant, and wound up about two blocks away. Carried Rachel to the restaurant, got the food, carried the food back and Rachel walked. She did great. I conned her a little by getting into the old see-who-gets-there-first game. She had fun and only complained about being tired when we were almost back at the car.

Dinner was good, Rachel went to bed easily, and Dawn, Chris and I talked and talked. Dawn went to bed around 10:30. Around 11:45, Chris asks if it's 11:45. Yeah. When's the last BART train? Oh, shit. Luckily, it turned out to be a bit after midnight, so we high-tailed it to the station. Then today he called to tell me that he had more adventure on the way back to base! At some point along the way, the train developed the infamous "door problem". When they can't get a door to close properly, they have to make everyone get off and take the train out of service. It's usually not that big a problem, because there should be another train coming along in 10-20 minutes. 'Course, that's not true with the last train of the night! Takes them 45 minutes to bring a train down from the end of the line to take them where they're going...

Tonight I went back to the slides... I've sorted, numbered and cataloged 195 slides from 1987 to 1990, including putting them into 3-ring binder sheets, 20 to a sheet. I decided to have a set of sheets (only 1 for '90, but 3 or 4 for the other 3 years) for each year and number the sheet ####-# using the year and the number of the sheet. For the slides, I decided to number them starting with 1 for each year. I have one unused slide sheet right now, and there are definitely more than 20 slides for 1991, so I am going to wait.

Actually, the REAL reason I'm waiting is that I am wondering if I am missing two rolls of slides! The first one I started with, which was the lowest numbered, was actually labeled roll #2. I just figured that there wasn't a roll 1, or that must have lost it a long time ago. When I started to work on 1991, though, I thought I had rolls 21 and 22, having just finished 20 for 1990, but then I realized that I actually had 22 and 23, having just finished 20... so, where's 21? In the morning I'll go through the chest upstairs and see if maybe there are a couple of rolls left. At least I won't have to redo too much. There are 50 slides for 1987 that I would have to renumber if I find roll #1, since that's almost certainly from '87. I suppose it could be '86, but I doubt that I'd be lucky enough both to find it and not need to renumber 50 slides.

I think I'll go through the rest of the boxes and make sure I know what they are and see whether I think any are missing...

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