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That old house
As you could guess, this is another one of my father’s test scans. It’s another reason I’m eager to get over there and do more. I have few pictures of my grandparents, and I haven’t seen the ones my father has in ages (it’s a chore to haul out the projector, and I’ve never been satisfied with the simpler “hold it up to a light and squint” method of slide viewing).
This is another picture from the old house in Billerica, MA – sometime in 1975 – with me, Christy, and my grandmother (Kauffman).
Seeing these old pictures makes it easier to remember the grandmother I loved, before Alzheimer’s slowly took her away from us.
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When we were four
Once again my father has upstaged me in our computer arms race. It seems that every time I buy a computer he buys a better one. To be fair, our replacement cycles are similarly modest, he earns more money, and his computing needs are more robust… but come on dad! Give a nerd a break.
Well this time he didn’t get another computer – he just got the film scanner I’ve been lusting. (Not really a dedicated film scanner, but a mid-range flatbed with a transparency adapter for serviceable, if not perfect film scans.)
I’ve been longing for a film scanner for a while now, because most of the old family pics are slides. My grandfather took lots of pics with slide film with an old SLR, and so did my father… so there’s a treasure waiting to be pulled out and scanned for my library.
If I had the time saved I’d be tempted to take a week off from work, just to go over and sort through them all, digitizing like a mad geek.
This picture is an early sample my dad brought over a week ago. It’s me, my parents, and Christy at the old house in Billerica, MA – probably sometime in 1975.
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Wired varmin
Did you know there are rodents that will eat the wiring in your car? Eat may not be the right word. Chew may be closer to the truth. In either case, I’m a victim of such a creature. And I’m not alone. Dozens of folks at my office have suffered the same fate – some more than once.
I got off lucky though. I only spent a little over $200 fixing my car. I wasn’t even having any symptoms – other than the “check engine” light on my dashboard. I brought it in to be checked and my mechanic laughed before he told me what was wrong. How often is that a good sign?
“Well Mr Kauffman, it looks like you had yourself a critter problem. The critter got up in your engine and chewed on some of your wiring, so we fixed the wiring and de-crittered it. Odd thing though – we found a mess of peanut shells scattered around.”
And that’s how I knew. It was an office critter.
You see my office is set back from the highway, with a lot of trees and grass. It’s really quite pleasant – and unusual for Pinellas County. We have lots of squirrels and raccoons – and lots of people who like to feed them… you guessed it: peanuts. When I say we have squirrels and raccoons, I don’t mean a couple here and there. It’s more like dust-bowl jack-rabbits, or an Old Testament plague. They’re freaking everywhere, and we’re blaming the peanut people.
It may not be entirely their fault. Critters like warm places in the winter, even in Florida. Parked cars tend to be warm places to hide out. If this was only happening once or twice a year (chewed wiring incidents) I think I could hold my tongue. But it’s not. It’s a dozen or more cars every year. The air conditioning kept going out in our office. They found a nest of peanuts there too. (They didn’t say anything about fried critters – do they have some innate sense of electrical current?)
If witness a feeding again I might start picking up peanuts and throwing them back. Hard.
