Not the best news...

We took the dog to the vet today to have the stitches removed from her surgery two weeks ago.  Three of the cuts have healed very nicely but the one on her chest is giving us some worry.  The vet explained that the mass they removed was neither liquid nor really a solid.  Again they could not remove all of the mass because it is too closely associated with the muscles of her chest.  She was also worried that the skin might be affected and that the wound might not heal.  Well, the skin has healed but there is still something distending the skin and making it warmer to the touch that it should be.  So the dog is on antibiotics again and we'll be stopping by the pharmacy this afternoon for more pills.  Well, at least we are only worrying about a dog!

I'm still copying old photos.  I think I've found most of the loose photos so now I'm starting in on those in albums.  We bought an Epson V500 Photo scanner for this project and so far I'm pretty happy with it.  I copied nearly 2,000 35mm slides.  It does four at a time; the downside it that it's pretty slow.  It takes pretty close to a minute a slide.  Enough time for the user to get really bored!  Photos also take about a minute but, because there is only one, it doesn't seem as bad.  I must be pushing a couple thousand of those as well.  This is a landscape that I took on a trip to England in 1990.  It was scanned from a standard 4x6 print (about 10 cm x 15cm).  The resultant image takes up 246k bytes.

Here is a slide from a 1981 trip to Leavenworth, Washington.  It runs to 300kb.

So I'm pretty happy with the scanner.  It's not archival quality or anything but my photos aren't either.  I do have a certain number of photos of the kids that would make perfect blackmail material if I were so inclined.  Big hair from the 1980's, leisure suits and cowboy outfits are the 'nice' photos!  I'm not worrying over much about removing dust or anything though if I spot something truly nasty I'll try removing it.  One photo, probably taken about 1965, had a fingerprint on it.  You didn't really notice it on the photo but the scanned version had a print good enough for the FBI.  The only real downside that I've found is that unusual sizes of film confuse the scanner.  I have some old 120 size slides and there doesn't seem to be a way to get the scanner to recognize it as a slide. 

I've got to say that going through these photos has given me some detective work.  Most are not marked as to year or subject or anything so I have to try to remember - when was I in Hibbing, MN or Farview Point (elevation 8819)?  It's kind of searching out those old memories helped along by the marvels of the internet.  The problem really arises when I don't remember the people!  There's no help for that.  I'd better get back to it though.  Have a good one!