I Seem To Have Been Busy
Greetings everyone!
It’s been a long week, but not because of what I accomplished. Instead, it’s because my beloved is far away for a few more days, visiting her mother. I dislike bachelorhood, and eagerly await her return.
The dogs look forward to that as well. Their celebration will be epic.
But despite my lonely status I did get a few big things done this week.
First, I digitized a whole bunch of documents. This photo shows the stack:
Those are research documents for a book about the area in which we live. They were offered to me by one of the authors of that book — titled Echos Across Seymour — as background for some forthcoming history pages on our local website.
I’m not exactly tooled up to scan them properly. I’d need a flatbed scanner — a big one, in some cases — rather than the feeding scanner I have. Many of these documents couldn’t go through a page feeder, so I decided not to risk any of them. Instead I photographed them with my phone, attempting to get the lighting to be acceptable. I think I did OK, but any professional archivist would laugh out loud.
Still, my intent was to make things readable, and I think I accomplished that.
Those folders were supposed to be returned to their owner on Thursday, but she’s sick so we held off for at least a week. As soon as she is better I’ll return them and get the folder for one more neighbourhood. The community association I volunteer with covers four different neighbourhoods — Blueridge, Seymour Heights, McCartney Creek, and Northlands — and I want all of that information for reference.
And to make it worth it to the author I’m dealing with, she gets a copy of the digitized version of the documents for safe keeping. Seems fair.
It’s a big job, though. I photographed just over 150 pages, and created almost 70 PDF files containing the resulting photos, along with notes about interesting issues I encountered, like missing documents or duplicated document identification numbers. It took at least two full days to make all that happen.
In addition to that, I spent a lot of time working on the next issue of the monthly email for the Community Association. It takes a surprisingly large amount of time to keep that properly organized, find images for each article, edit things, and so on. That’s been another day or two right there.
Coupled with that has been a set of changes to the website, another one of those projects that never goes away and only gets more complicated.
Recently I discovered that one of our local government(ish?) website — the one for the Metro Vancouver Area — has been substantially reworked, and while all the information I used to link to is still there, it seems all the URLs have been changed. That has meant spending some time on a few of our web pages discovering which links have gone dead, searching out the replacements, and updating things accordingly. The fun never stops.
And of course I have continued the work on our main bathroom. It’s finally approaching completion.
I got all the towel bars up, replaced the toilet, and cleaned everything. In addition I secured the bottoms of the medicine cabinets to the wall so they don’t move when you opened the doors.
What remains is painting the trim around the doorway, figuring out a good set of patches for the insets for door hinges and the door latch, and filling the holes on the floor where the door stop used to be. The paint will be done before Anne returns. The other two items will take a bit longer to resolve.
Still up in the air is the question of replacing the sinks and faucets. We’ll live with them for now, but that salmon colour is awful, and the faucets are two-tone chrome and gold, which doesn’t go with anything else. Still, they are serviceable for the moment, so replacing them is not critical.
Other than taking care of dogs and attempting to feed myself, that’s it for the past week.
Assuming no air travel issues, Anne returns on Sunday and life will get back to normal. As I say, I can hardly wait!
I hope you’re doing what you want, when you want to do it, and things are good in general. Cheers!