I'm probably making today a quickie post today so as to finish something I've been putting off for over five years. Five (or more) years ago, we bought a scanner that will digitize the slides I took in a past life. Since I've been going through camera equipment, I figured this would fit right in. It somehow never occurred to me that I would have to do this one slide at a time. No conveyor belt sending them through one right after another. I'm about a third of the way through the first tray of 300, which covers the 1990 part of our academic year in the Netherlands. To complicate matters, it seems that I only wrote down on the guide sheet where the first 150 were taken. I can probably identify the rest, though, and always have The Professor if he remembers where some shot was taken.
And what a walk down memory lane! Son #1 was going through the not-so-terrible twos, and The Professor was the young man I had met in a laundromat five or six years before. Son #2 was in utero for the first set of places and a babe in arms in the others. I have yet to see myself in any of the slides given that I was the family photographer as the kids grew up. I should show up in some eventually. Somewhere around here is a box labelled "slide projector." Besides a projector, that box contains the slides I took while doing study abroad in Spain and some general travel throughout Europe in the summer of 1975. I saw said box in the basement a few weeks ago; it is possible that The Professor moved it out to the garage in his quest for organization. When we find those slides, I'll be going even farther down Memory Lane.
Quickies from the coronavirus's international front: There is an outbreak in Bangkok that may take two months to control. That can't be good for tourism. India has set a new daily case record of 126,789 cases. Possibly related to this, New Zealand has for two weeks suspended entry for all travelers from India including citizens of New Zealand. Due north of here, the province of Ontario is entering a one-month lockdown; new cases tripled throughout March. ICU admissions have increased at a rate faster that the province's worst-case scenario modelling. The French Open tennis tournament will be held a week later than planned in response to the coronavirus situation. Personally, I'm not sure a week will be long enough.
Here at home, the British variant is now the dominant strain of coronavirus here and is one reason that case numbers are rising. Between March 30 and April 6, cases in Nebraska increased in the 50 to 100 percent range. Increases between 10 and 50 percent were recorded in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, Rhode Island, Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, Hawaii, and Delaware. The only states showing decreases between 10 and 50 percent were Wyoming, South Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia. All the other states, including Virginia, are holding steady between decreasing 10 percent and increasing at the same rate.
Cases in children have been rising due to re-starting many youth sports such as soccer. One article mentioned parents who said that their child's emotional well-being depended on whether they could do organized youth sports. I guess kids don't just go to the park and kick balls around or shag fly balls any longer. While that would also allow virus particles to spread between kids, there would be fewer kids there than there are in an organized soccer game. My kids did t-ball for a year or two then no longer wanted to. They were never interested in soccer. Both did play ultimate Frisbee while in high school, but that was about the extent of their organized sports experience. Now, of course, they both run ultra-marathons, definitely not a team sport.
As might be expected, the pinata business has been hurt by the coronavirus. No parties means no real need for pinatas. There is, however, one pinata in particular that has been very popular. That would be the pinata shaped like a spiky coronavirus particle. I could almost see ordering one of those for a party marking the official end of the pandemic.
Back to those slides!
2 comments:
Slide conversion ... your process is why I still haven't done anything with ours (plus the fact that the specialized scanner costs about $100). There' a service in my area that will convert them; I just need to get organized enough to gather them up.
I haven't figured out if the cases of the British variant were imported to the US, or natural mutations that were just first identified in the UK?
Franco was still in charge in 1975, wasn't he? I was in Spain in fall of 1973.
I'd forgotten about the slides. David digitised some of his parent's slides years ago, before it was a thing. We had a sheet pinned to the dining room wall, the slide projector and a camera on a tripod. I think we hit the boredom threashold before we got through the slides.
Here the British variant was called the Kent variant but as it's a dominant strain now it's just covid.
Post a Comment