I was beginning to wonder if I was going to hear back from Kodak about the 8mm reels I’d sent off for digitizing in early July, and while I was sweating my nuts off in a tent in Southern Maryland, I got an email from them. They sent me links to download all four videos, which were all between 500-600MB in size. I was pleasantly surprised with all four of the videos.

Dad had issues with his Super-8 camera back in the day where the light meter didn’t expose the film correctly, so some of the footage is dark, but the folks at Kodak did their best to work with what they were given, and they actually pulled a lot of the detail back out. I think my biggest criticism would be the sharpness of the footage—I wonder if there’s a way I can take the footage I’ve got and put it through some kind of enhancement to pull more detail out.

For the price, it’s fantastic, and when I get these reels back I’ll have to figure out what the next four will be.

I’ve mentioned my disappearing sunglasses previously, so when my brown pair went missing again earlier this spring, I figured they were gone for good this time and it wasn’t worth writing about. I got along fine with the black pair and actually grew to like them just as much as the brown ones. Yesterday as I was cleaning sand out of the Scout I found the brown ones, having fallen in between the passenger seat and the transmission tunnel; they’d gone unnoticed all summer, even as I was cutting and installing heat matting, thankfully landing lenses up so that the glass wasn’t scratched.

Jen and I pulled the trigger on a closet organization system a while back, and it was delivered several weeks ago. The boxes are piled up in the bathroom waiting for me to get started assembling. One of the first things I needed to do was address the outlet left in the closet, which was still hanging out of the wall. It was old enough to date back to the Doctor, and I used that box to jump a line out to install a spotlight over the driveway. During demo I found that it had just been attached to the paneling and nothing behind that, so it was left hanging out of the wall. I found a blue plastic new work box and cut the drywall wider on one side until I could tuck the box flap between the drywall and the wood sheathing behind it, then screwed it in place. Then I did a drywall repair job on the remainder of the opening. With that complete, I can now start measuring and installing racks and MDF for the closet system.