Progress of Sorts

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Image by markito from Pixabay
The interminable rain continues. I think it has been more or less unrelenting since my trip to London on 18th November which was one of those beautiful, frosty, blue sky days. This morning when leaving the village by our main access (a narrow, unmarked lane between hedgerows) a deluge of water was running off the fields and over the ditches onto it. Fingers crossed the weather forecast is now correct and we are going to have a spell of dry but cold conditions as I really don't fancy the idea of being trapped in my home by running water.

We have very much given up on the idea of  an autumnal tidy-up in the garden now. Even with a dry spell, the risk of disturbing hibernating hedgehogs (yes that's how overgrown it is) will be too great. Hopefully, however, the sodden ground will dry out before winter is over, allowing us to at least give a much needed prune to overgrown shrubs and trees. 

In the meantime, I have found the silver lining in those rain clouds and been catching up with the piles of paperwork that seem to breed on my desk when retirement life pulls me off in more interesting directions. I've also made some progress with the photo overload that I blogged about a few weeks ago. 

Scanning as I go and trying not to hang onto too many actual paper photographs, I've so far succeeded in condensing what were 14 albums into just 2 and retaining for the most part only quality pictures of people who are important to us in the new compendiums. I calculate that if I can keep it up (assuming there is a lot more rain to come), I should be able to reduce the 42 albums I started with to a mere 6!

Where I can, I also now have most of the contents of those original 14 albums scanned and saved in JPEG format which has allowed me to edit the sharpness and colour. I've discovered that the black and white pictures from the 1960's and earlier can be reproduced digitally in a very clear format and whilst the colour photos from the 1980's are equally preservable in that way, they don't always cope so well with being magnified on a computer screen. The 1970's pictures are awful though; I think some were taken with an instamatic camera that had cartridge film rather than an actual roll and the colour has now faded, leaving a mass of indistinct sepia tinted shots. As for the polaroid prints, surely I didn't really have so many pictures of plain white sheets or are they perhaps of snow drifts?

I know people who have prioritised sorting the family memorabilia for their first year of retirement. I've been saving mine for weeks of bad weather but now it's arrived, I do feel proud of my progress.



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