This and that.

The cats let me sleep in until 7:30 AM. When I rolled out of bed I found the ground dusted with snow and the morning temperature of 23 degrees turned out to be the low for the day. It got "up" all the way to 33 degrees this afternoon but the sun never made an appearance. The winds were blowing out of the northwest at a pretty steady 20 MPH with gusts into the 30 MPH range so it felt a good deal colder whenever I stepped outdoors. With snow flurries much of the day, it sure didn't feel like baseball season. More flurries are forecast for tonight and again on Wednesday night. Wednesday's high will be about the same as today's--the low 30s. We should be getting back to near normal on Thursday although the forecast is for a little below the mid-50 average temperature.

Terry called from her mom's to say she's sick as a dog. She felt fine when she left here and right through her dinner party with her friends but woke up during the night with chills and vomited several times. It could be a flu or it could be food poisoning. She had to cancel her luncheon date with our daughter and curled up beneath the covers all day eating nothing but mom's chicken soup. She'll stay with her mom again tonight and, if feeling better, will come back to the Aerie Wednesday afternoon.

I kept the fire going in the living room all day to raise the house temperature to a toasty 70 degrees. Our propane delivery yesterday was for just over 110 gallons which isn't bad for the entire month of March. (Propane heats our home and hot water and runs the dryer and stove. January we used about twice that amount.) I guess you could consider that a sign of our impending spring.

I spent the day scanning 35mm slides into a digital format. Most of today's slides came from 1979 and 1989. You might say I went back in time 20-30 years. Some pictures from my days at Seton Hall (graduate school) and then from a family vacation up through Wisconsin (Hayward's Fishing Hall Of Fame), Minnesota (Duluth and the iron mine country, Grand Portage) and circling back through Canada along the northern shores of the Great Lakes Forts William and Henry on opposite ends of that stretch).

All I can say is that my picture taking back then was really poor. The worst thing about using film is that you have to wait to see the results so if your traveling, for instance, if you screw up a shot, you wouldn't know it until you got home and got the roll developed. When you see the results, it's way too late to go back and take it over again. Today, with most digital cameras, you get instant feedback and the cost of "development" is negligible.

Scanning slides can be a tedious chore. Especially when you're not sure you want to save a particular slide. I say scan them all and be safe. Getting the slides dust free is a task too. Even stored in the original little boxes from Kodak, they still have dust, water marks, finger prints or scratches from previous viewings. The dust can be removed with a camel hair brush and a small puff of air. The water marks and finger prints are almost impossible to remove and forget about the scratches. They are there to stay.

I've now scanned around 1000 slides and haven't even started on Terry and my two big cross country trips of 1976 and 1993. Each of those have their own separate boxes and the slides probably total over a thousand easily.