You’ll note that there’s a new entry on the long-ignored houseblog, where I start detailing the changes we’re making in our living room.
This weekend saw the addition of a new color to the Lockardugan palette, and the beginning of a shop class project.
All of the baseboards have been pulled out (with the exception of the one behind the radiator) and walls have been patched. At some point I’ll get the time to run wiring and fabricate new baseboards (and we’ll get the money to have them hooked up), and we can close up the walls. In the meantime, I started building a frame around our shitty looking fireplace and tacking up cardboard to block out how large the cover will be.
I’m going to follow the pseudo-Federalist/Colonial woodworking in the rest of the house and keep the cover as simple as possible. When it’s done, the exposed brick will get painted with hi-temp flat black and the wood will get painted with the gloss white we have on the rest of the woodwork.
From a best-guess estimate, I’ve got about 800 photos scanned from my grandfather’s archive. This includes some (but, tantalizingly, not all) of the oldest family photos in his posession. The total haul is about 5.11GB of data. Some of those are dupes- I did the highest-resolution scans I could of the most important and rarest photos in the collection, which means that Thomas, my great-great grandfather, is preserved in ones and zeroes at 1200dpi for the long-term future.
I’ve got about eight hours of videotape of my grandfather reviewing his collection, some with and some without my father helping to draw stories out of him. He seemed to want to get to the latest photos immediately, and we had to explain to him several times that we were more interested in his earlier history, the stuff nobody knows about. Once he warmed up, he was rattling off the names of people who had us stumped. It was interesting to see where his memory was sketchy, though—the names of dogs, for example: On the farm, they had a long succession of barn animals with names like Soupy, Shnooky, and Pumpkin. It seemed like he identified every dog from every decade as “Judy”, an interchangeable and unknown (to me) mutt who died before my time.
Based on my experience, I have a few recommendations for anybody tackling this project in the future:
- Bring a scanner and scan everything and anything you can. Scan the fronts and the backs of the photos-often times there’s better stuff on the back than on the front.
- Have someone helping you draw the stories out of your relative. If a memory pops up about a particular photo (and you’ll see it on their face when it does) ask them about the place, time, people who were there, and how it made them feel. You’ll be amazed at what they remember, and that will lead you to more questions.
- Your relative may start out slow, but once you engage them, it’s amazing how much they look forward to the process. My grandfather is 90, and I think he was thrilled to have us talking to him about his history.
- Block out a lot of time. I had five days, and they went by quickly. Between filming four hours a day and scanning at night, I was exhausted at the end of each day.
On the way out of town, I stopped back in and showed him my photos of all the work done on the house since we moved in—something to make the housepainter in his blood proud. He peered into the LCD of my laptop as I took him through the rooms, asked questions about the work I’d done—clucking when I mentioned repairing plaster, and shaking his head at the hallway cieling—and nodded approvingly when I was done.
I’ve always felt that I never spent enough time with my grandparents. Because we were geographically the second-furthest grandkids from their house, visits in the summer and for holidays were usually quick and over before they’d started. Because I’m a weird half-social misanthrope, I have a difficult time keeping relationships strong and fresh, often letting the time between contact with important people in my life stretch on far too long. As a result, I always felt like an outsider at family gatherings, like the kid who stood at the back of the school dance and watched everyone else have a good time.
This visit changed that for the better, I think—not only because I recorded some of our family’s history, but because I began to change the way I see my family. Seeing my relatives in their younger years somehow made me feel closer to each of them, like I was watching over them as they grew up and formed families of their own. Instead of feeling like an outsider, I felt like I was more of a part of their lives, even if they were frozen in time on a piece of paper, especially as my grandfather rattled off names and told me which house they stood in front of and whose wedding they were attending. One of the resolutions I made for this year was to be a better son, husband, and friend in my relationships, and I made this trip the kickoff of that promise to my family. Spending time with my father and his father (and the rest of my family, between scanning pictures, ha-ha) meant a lot to me, and I think it meant a lot to each of them. More importantly, it wasn’t that hard to do. The hard part is in the follow-up, and that’s an ongoing process that’s going to take a lot of discipline, something I don’t have a lot of.
As I was leaving, I noticed the wind had blown the trail of my footprints in the snow away, as if I’d never been there at all. I’m glad I got the time to spend with my grandfather, and that he got to know me a little bit better; My next project is going to be collating the photos I have with the information I’ve got and try to put something together for him to share with his family—and to be there when he does.
The guy that won Best Screenplay for Crash (and Million Dollar Baby) is also the guy who created and wrote Walker, Texas Ranger.
Well, it’s snowing like a sonofabitch up here in New York State. Originally my plan was to get on the road tomorrow morning, but I may be delayed on account of weather. In the last hour or so, half of Lake Erie just fell on my parents’ backyard in the form of fluffy white powder. My black Jeep is a gray smudge in the parking lot up back. At least there’s cold beer in the basement.
While I’ve been up here, I’ve had some technical difficulties. If you’ve been trying to email my alter ego, it looks like the server shat the bed, so I’d use the idiotking address listed on the right there until further notice.
In local CNY news, a guy who owns a “massage therapy studio” here in my parents’ town just got popped for pouring his own poop down a floor drain in the Men’s bathroom of the county courthouse. Repeatedly. It seems this crackpot individual, who is arguably not dealing with a full deck, has been doing this for some time. He lives in a permanently beached sailboat north of town, and writes long rambling letters to the editor of the local paper about matters random and bizarre. The town has apparently been giggling over this incident, and the aforementioned editor pointed out a few troubling questions: Why not dump it in the woods surrounding your house? Why not use the toilet instead of the floor drain? and most importantly, why carry it in an ice chest (the reason somebody finally noticed and called the cops)? An amusing postscript to the story is that the local sheriff’s last name is Outhouse.
Yesterday we got two solid hours of Grampy’s time on tape. He went to mass in the morning, so we got about a half-hour in before lunch and another half-hour afterwards, making our way through the envelope marked “the 60’s”. I left so that he could take his nap and returned to the house with a pile of photos to scan, most of which I got done. We headed back up at 3:30 to continue with both envelopes from the 70’s, and as a bonus, we got about fifteen minutes of Grampy talking to my Dad about his parents and grandparents.
I’m heading back over today to talk about the balance of the photos, which consist mainly of the 80’s and anything else we didn’t get to. I’m going to try to power through that relatively quickly, and then get back to just talking with Grampy about anything pre-1950 I can think of while the tape is rolling. Then, one more evening of scanning, and we’ll call this expedition done.
Fuck, I missed Lost last night. What happened?
iMac shutdown-restart.
Your iMac restarts as soon as you shut it down. Sez here you hafta replace the clock battery and reset the CUDA switch.