We just cancelled our Sept. flight to Northern Spain a week or so ago (Norte route). First time in some twenty years that we have not done a major hike or backpack of some sort, and first time in 10 years that we have not been walking a Camino route. Susan has intense leg pain if she walks any uphill distance at all beyond about 10 minutes - according to her doctor, just something that needs rest, but we are more than three months into it at this point. Susan has blogged about it:
backpack45.blogspot.com/2014/08/where-does-one-find-answers-vagaries-of-life backpack45.blogspot.com/2014/09/in-fog, but this post is mostly about I am doing instead.
The positive thing about this is that I have days, weeks, months suddenly available. Those never ending house chores sitting on the to do list are suddenly being accomplished. The back fence is repaired. Formerly on the edge of a down slope, it now sits on a three foot wide deck, farther away from the house than it once was, and with a little shed perched on it, to boot. I've indulged my desire for big rolling tool box with those flat shallow drawers, brought the garage state of disorder down by 75%. I even put wheels on the table saw so it is less effort to drag it around.
Susan's 2006 book
Camino Chronicle is part journal and history, but also has a substantial "how to" section. That part has become somewhat dated. It talks about buying film and travelers checks. The links pointed to Santiagobis as the forum to go to for instant information. Facebook was not mentioned. When we put it on Kindle a few years back, all that information was updated, but it never got to the paperback edition. So, with time suddenly available, I was able put out a print on demand version of the book with all the current information. Now I no longer have to run down to FedEx or the post office every time I get a little order from Amazon (they had a thing for one or two book orders every week). Instead they get it from Createspace. The process was fairly easy and I will probably do a blog post just on the process for the book techies among you.
We have a lot of street fairs this time of year. Booths with jewelry, clothes, alcoholic beverages, pretty women, popcorn, you name it. The streets are flat so Susan can walk for an hour or two. Well, we passed this booth promoting a scan your slides or photos service, with a great show special price. I went for it. Got a deal to scan 800 35mm slides, which I thought would make a substantial dent in our unscanned slides. When we got home, I started looking at the task. More than I realized. We have about 20 carousels, each with 140 slides. There also slide trays full of slides, and top of that many many envelopes with aps negatives. This service is not exactly cheap - costs about as much as the original processing cost. Massive triage was required. We decided to each select the 400 oldest that we wanted to keep. I've been taking slides from 1958 up to the digital era, with a very bad detour to aps format.
We resurrected our projectors, and the stack loader. It only took me a few minutes to realize that on the old images, only the people mattered. No one cares, least of all me, about a so so picture of Yellowstone taken forty years ago. Over the course of two days I threw out some 2000 slides, retrieving all from the trash three times to make sure I hadn't thrown something out that I wanted (I had, each time). For the final cut, we put the keepers in carousels and projected them in large format to make the decision. At this point 890 slides are in the hands of the scanners, mostly early family history. Nothing can go wrong at the scanners, right? Those images aren't going to vanish from our life?
Towards the end of our review, the advance reverse on one of the projectors stopped working - just a buzz when I tried to go either direction. Turns out this is a known problem. Plastic gears become brittle and fail, and
ebay has a repair kit for a small price. A year or so ago, my Kindle screen got broken on one of our hiking trips, and with ebay and
youtube directions, I was able to replace it myself. A few months ago, big black fuzzy circles started appearing on images from my Canon S95 camera. So, I googled for repair Canon S95, and again found an ebay kit, and youtube directions. The
directions were in German, which I don't understand, but that is another blog topic. I was able to replace my S95 lens and lcd successfully, so that gave me the courage to attempt the carousel repair. It was much more difficult than either the Kindle or the S95 mainly due to the tiny space in which you have to remove motors, screws, plungers, etc and then fit back in exactly the right location. The projector now works, but is sort of loud, so I should open it up again and see if I have a wire touching the fan. Of course, you may ask why repair the projector if you are only going to use it a few more times? - for the challenge. Since we have two, and rarely use either, the cost of my failing would be little.
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