Everything in the greenhouse has gone nuts in the last week. Where there were only a few tentative blooms on a few plants, now every plant has three or four branches filled with yellow flowers, and half of those already have fruit beginning. Even the difficult varieties are producing: the Cherokee Purples have five or six fruit apiece. They’ve suddenly gotten taller as well, and I’ve been pretty ruthless in cutting back the secondary growth unless it’s already got something growing. As a result the plants look thin and spindly compared to giant leafy bushes, which I’ve been accustomed to growing in years past. This time I’m pruning everything back except that which will produce, hoping they’ll mature and ripen faster.
I think the only stuff that hasn’t bloomed yet is the strange tub in the back, with seedlings that always seemed slower than the rest. Those plants have shot up in the last week but they’re 1/4 the size of the others. I think they’ll wind up being producers late in the season.
There are flower buds on several of the plants; everything looks pretty healthy except for one tub in the very back, which has three very lazy plants that are only several inches tall.
We’re at that point in the porch project where we’ve got the bones of it 95% complete, but all of the stuff that has to happen now is taking forever to come together. This past week it crawled along while I applied successive layers of polyurethane to the floor—five in total, equalling about 3/4 of a gallon. We’d decided we didn’t want to see the pattern get worn off immediately, so some serious protection was in order. Now there’s a hard candy shell on the whole thing, and hopefully it won’t come off for a long time.
So my focus was mostly elsewhere on Saturday and Sunday. I pulled a stepladder out of the garage and started scraping and priming windows on the driveway side of the house, working my way around to the two jalousie windows on the porch—which haven’t been touched in the 17 years we’ve lived here. Late in the morning we had a visit from the invisible fence guy, who fixed the wire that had been cut when the driveway went in, as well as altered the layout so the backyard is its own zone to keep Hazel from rushing dogs passing by the front yard.
After he’d left, I took Finn on a bike ride down the hill to the asylum, figuring it would be something interesting to look at. The roads were closed to through traffic, but we pedaled around the campus and looked at the crumbling buildings while I managed Finn’s anxieties about trespassing and breaking laws. She is a rule-follower, except when it involves chocolate. On our way out a nice security guard told us they’d closed the campus up because there was an outbreak of COVID in the wards that are still open, but since we’d only been on our bikes he wasn’t worried about us.
Sunday was overcast and cooler, so I pulled the Scout out into the driveway and swapped out the starter. When I’d finished up that and some other smaller projects, I pulled the pressure washer out of the garage and cleaned the backs of the Adirondack chairs so that they’d be dry for paint on Monday.
Monday broke sunny and warm, and the fifth coat of poly was dry on the floor, so I patched the final areas on the porch that needed attention and left them to dry. Out in the backyard I set the Adirondack chairs up behind the greenhouse and sprayed them with primer and then two coats of white semigloss. I have to say, other than the fact that the container only holds a quart of paint, the sprayer is fantastic to work with, and worth every penny I spent on it. What would have easily taken all day to paint with a brush got done in about two hours time—including cleanup. The area behind the greenhouse looks like someone murdered a snowman, but the chairs look damn good.
While the chairs were drying I went inside and cleaned up the patches on the porch, and then we hauled the furniture around to the front of the house to bring inside. I’m going to let Jen do the big reveal when it’s ready, but it really looks great in here (I’m sipping coffee and writing this on one of the new chairs).
We took a quick ride in the Scout to drop off a birthday present Finn made for a friend, and when we got back it was the perfect weather to light a fire in the backyard. While the fire was getting warm, Jen brought the clippers down and she shaved my quarantine fro down to a manageable 3/4″. It’s choppy and patchy in places but it’s worlds better than the giant bushy mess I’d been hiding under hats for the past month. Finn walked over to invite the neighbors over for some socially distant s’mores. We stayed out and chatted until 10:30, grateful for conversation and company, and then all staggered off to bed smelling of woodsmoke and chocolate.
As of tonight I’ve got a total of 560 slides processed from a scanned pool of 877, and I scanned another 195 this evening. I pushed through and made it to the end of the carousels, so I can send the scanning equipment back without late charges and store the slides away. It’s been a slog but I feel good about getting it all done, and I’ll have plenty of time to go back and clean up the scans that aren’t perfect.
Oh, and it was my birthday. It was a quiet one. We took a family walk at noon to the local café to get some takeout lunch, and promised we’d be back to support them. It was a brisk but sunny day, and it felt great to be outside with the girls. At dinner, Jen cooked a delicious roast with mashed potatoes (I had seconds) and then we had a flourless torte with three candles for dessert. Finn was worried that I wouldn’t be happy with my birthday, but I told her I had everything I wanted: we’re together, we’re all healthy, and things are OK.
I scanned about 300 slides last night after the girls went to bed. I have no idea if this sounds easy or not, but it’s definitely a pain in the lower back. Doing the math, I was averaging 2 slides a minute, with two quick breaks along the way. What I’ve got to do is pull each individual slide out of the carousel and hold it up to see if it’s something worth scanning. Is it people? Is it people we know? Is it a landscape shot? Is it a picture of cars or lawnmowers or random flowers? Is it a duplicate shot of something I’ve seen before—and if so, is it better or worse? When I’ve found two I like, I put them in the carrier, put that on the adapter mounted to the front of the camera, and zoom in to the first slide to adjust the focus. When it looks sharp, I shoot the picture and repeat for the second slide. Then I pull it all apart, turn off Live View on the camera, put the slides back, and repeat the process, going all the way around the carousel.
At the rate I’m going I don’t think I’ll make it through all of the carousels. There are just too many of them and a lot of them are double-capacity, meaning they hold 140 slides instead of the standard 70—Dad used to curse these larger trays because half the time they wouldn’t work in his projectors and get all jammed up. Two trays a night is about all my lower back can handle.
He made some Greatest Hits carousels over the years where he’d pull one or two good shots from an event and put them in a new carousel, so things have slowly been mixed up over time. I’m running into photos that belong in a carousel I’ve already put back somewhere and thus are out of sync; the OCD part of me wants to organize them all and the practical side of me says fuck that, keep scanning, you only have the gear until Friday.
I know I won’t be able to post-process them all before the gear goes back, and that’s fine, because I’ll have plenty of time here at the house to do that. As mentioned before, there are so many variations on film stock and exposure settings that I’m constantly shifting settings around, but Lightroom has some nifty tools to apply settings to a batch of photos (a series of shots taken with the same film stock on the same day in the same conditions, can, with a few slight tweaks, all benefit from the same base adjustments).
I think what’s required is some triage of the last box-and-a-half of carousels to see what’s there and what demands archiving; if the number of carousels is high I might extend the rental for a few days, but if I can jam through the rest in the next three nights, I’ll do that instead.
And in the future, there are a bunch of pictures that are definitely worth doing some precision dust and scratch removal on—today I sent Renie a link to a portrait when she was maybe four; her hair is a beautiful curly mess, Dad got the focus and exposure right, the depth of field is perfect, the light is perfect, and she looks like an angel.
See that truck parked behind us? We drove all the way across the country in that, with no air conditioning, in August.
I’ve been promising both Finn and Zachary we’d go snowboarding for two years now. Last year was a bust for a couple of different reasons, but I wanted to make good on it so they didn’t think I was a complete loser. I planned out a Tuesday night dropoff with Karean so we could hit the road early on Wednesday and be at the slopes by 10. In a rare display of foresight, I prebought the tickets online and downloaded rental forms so that they’d be pre-filled when we walked in to the shop.
Our drive up was uneventful, and we were in the parking lot by 10:10. At 10:30 we were sitting on benches in the rental barn putting on boots and zipping up snowpants. They issued us boards and we walked out to the bunny slope to wait for our instructor, an amiable fellow whose name I forgot, who ended every sentence with “Word.” Nobody else was there, so we had Word all to ourselves, and he took us up the Magic Carpet to the halfway point on the bunny slope and he showed the kids the basics. Finn has been through this twice but still hadn’t mastered stopping without falling, so we worked on that while Word helped Zachary get his basics down.
We moseyed to the bottom of the hill and then climbed on the chair lift to the top of the bunny slope, and wade our way down from the top again. I let Word work with Zachary while I tried to get Finn to stay upright, and she began to get real frustrated. At the point where our patience for each other was running out, Word and I switched and I asked him to help her with stopping. By the time we all made it down the mountain, she was stopping in complete control and Zachary was in control of his board.
We agreed to stop and get some lunch, so we thanked Word and headed into the lodge. After they downed a pizza and a burger they were ready to hit the hill again. We used the magic carpet for the rest of the day (I didn’t want to leave one of them to ride the chair lift alone) and Finn did three runs on her own without falling down once, practicing her stopping on her heel edge. I helped Zachary with his control and we worked on braking as well.
Finley, whose outright fear of the Magic Carpet kept us from riding it the entire second half of our last trip, was so confident in herself that she rode it alone several times, as did Zachary. We stayed out on the bunny slope for two and a half hours, practicing our control, and I showed Finn how to turn into her right foot and brake on her toe side.
By 3:30 we were all a little tired, and Zachary had fallen on his butt one too many times, so we packed up our stuff and headed home.
There was a point in the day where I was sitting on the slope in the sunshine, watching the two of them push off and glide down the hill, turning into the board or away from it, pushing out with their feet, and stopping upright, smiles on their faces, and it about made my heart explode with pride and joy for the both of them. And I was glad to be here, on this earth, under that warm sun, with a body that still works, strapped to a board so that I could stand on two feet and glide down behind them and tell them how fucking good they were doing.