So, What Are We Doing?

We are staying home, of course.  We don't have any choice.  We only leave our resort to go grocery shopping.  Since everything in our resort is closed or cancelled, we only leave our house to walk.  It is the same for everyone here.  Lots of people are walking, some riding their bikes around the resort.  We saw a woman on roller blades yesterday.  And if exercise isn't their interest, people just drive around in their golf carts.  Reminds me of Sunday afternoon drives when I was a child.

I did a lot of house cleaning when the stay at home order first came out; recently we have begun going through our storage compartments.  John found a box of old letters.  In 1973 he spent 13 weeks attending the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The FBI established this academy to provide training to local police department command officers  John was a lieutenant on the Boulder Police Department.  I stayed home in Boulder with our two boys, Doug age 5 and Eric 18 months.  We wrote letters to each other every day.  Since it was before the cell phone era, we only talked once a week.  Long distance calls were expensive.

We have both been reading those letters before destroying them.  We feel like we have stepped back in time 47 years.  Nixon was president, Agnew resigned during that time and the Watergate hearings were underway.  Our parents were all still alive and we almost feel we should give them a call this afternoon, just to see how they are doing.  We are in a real time warp.

We have been a keeper of old family photographs in both our families.  We all know printed photos deteriorate.  I have been making digital copies of these photos periodically over the years.  I decided now was the time to finish the job.  Yesterday I copied 620 photos, mainly from the first 25 or so years of our marriage.  In the past I have copied many of the family photos from before we were born.

I am almost done with the copying.  Now I am trying to move them into albums so I can find something when I want to.  So far, I have only done that with part of the 620 newly copied pictures.  I wonder if I will finish this task before we are free to travel and shop again?

Other folks in our resort have different ways to keep busy. We see notes on the streets, written with colored chalk, hearts cut out and put up in windows, banners of encouragement. Here are two cute signs put up in one yard. We saw the top display today for the first time. The second was from late March.

Stay safe and healthy, everyone.

Time or Money

We have somewhere upward of 1,000 color slides from our early life, even before we were married. But who has a screen and slide projector to look at them today? We sure don't. I have read that we can get a screen and a projector and show the slides, then take pictures of each image with our digital camera. Recently, we joined Costco and they will copy the slides and give us two copies on CDs of the digital images. That sounded like a good idea.

We picked up the small cardboard boxes to each contain the slides in batches of 50 for them to work with. But, when I figured what it would cost--at 22 cents each, 1000 slides would cost $999.78--we started to second guess that method. John went on Amazon.com and found a machine for $99 that would produce digital images from the slides. $99 versus $999 sounded pretty good. This week,I have begun the process.

Here I am, copying slides. Each row in that box contains 100 slides. I am trying to copy 200 a day. Once I got the process down, it goes fairly quickly. I insert one slide at a time, push save, then insert another. It is fun to see pictures of our childhood and of our children when they were young. We have photos of both sons playing in the lawn sprinkler on a hot day, as well as pictures for lots of camping trips with family and friends. We have slides from a trip to California John took as a young boy with his parents and brother. So far, I have copies about 700 slides. When I finish the box of slides you see in the photo, I will copy 150+ slides my parents took when I was young.

After I finish digitizing these slides, we will be able to copy images to CDs and share them with family members who are pictured in them. I am also digitizing old photos and then forwarding the originals to the people seen in them. I also back up all these digital files, keeping 3 separate copies so they aren't lost. Isn't modern technology wonderful?