Andrew Huey | pointlessly blogging since 2001
Today would have been Dad’s 79th birthday. Here’s a nice photo of Dad, having a little nap, probably after eating a couple of burgers off the grill. He looks quite peaceful and content.
It’s nearly a year since he passed away, but it really doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. Happy birthday Dad, wherever you are.
I hit a minor milestone with my parents’ old house today. I have now completely emptied out the attic. There’s nothing left up there except a whole bunch of dust, and probably a few rusty nails. And, since tomorrow is bulk pickup day, I got their old mattress and box spring out on the curb. And a bunch of other stuff, including two Christmas tress and (hopefully) the last box of my brother Pat’s old clothes.
There’s still quite a lot of stuff to go through, and quite a few things to think about selling, storing, or tossing. But I feel like I’m making progress.
I’m still working my way through all of the negatives I had scanned in by ScanCafe, by the way. Here are a couple of nice photos, one of Mom and one of Dad, both from a Christmas long ago.
Social Security Death Index Interactive Search
I wish I knew about this when I was filling out the ridiculous life insurance form I had to fill out for my Dad’s insurance. I had to give birth & death dates, and SSNs, for all his brothers, and his parents. (I actually left a bunch of stuff blank, since I didn’t know it, and seem to have gotten away with it, since I’ve gotten past that form, and onto another one. I think maybe two or three more forms, and they may actually send me a check. Almost a year after he died. Sigh.)
Anyway, this is a little scary. It seems possible to look up just about anybody dead in the US, and get their full birth date, death date, SSN, and at least a general idea of their last address. I guess the dead don’t need to worry about identity theft, but still.
I think this is from Halloween 1976. I would have been only 9, and so still at an age where making a cardboard Liberty Bell costume, and painting it red, white, and blue, would have seemed like a good idea.
I finally finished uploading all the slides I had scanned in by ScanCafe. There are a bunch of good ones in there. Some very nice photos from Japan, though some seem to have picked up some mold or something that couldn’t be removed by their digital ICE.
I just got my first batch of scans back from ScanCafe. I’m uploading about 2GB worth of images to Flickr right now. I think it’s going to take a while. Here’s a nice photo of me (in a Mets jacket) and my brother Mike (in a Yankees jacket).
Happy birthday Pat.
I’ve sent off two big orders to ScanCafe recently. The first was a box of my Dad’s old slides (about 600) and the second was a bunch of my Dad’s old negatives (including both 35mm and medium format). I sent the second box in while they were having a 25% sale, which saved me a substantial amount of money, given how many negatives I had.
I’ve got one more box of negatives to scan. I was going to wait until ScanCafe had another sale, but I just got an e-mail from them saying that they’re going to raise their prices in May. Of course, they don’t say which prices or by how much. Hmm, now I’m not sure if I should wait or not. I also just figured out that they post their sales to Twitter at http://twitter.com/scancafedeals so I think maybe I’ll just keep an eye on that and wait for the next 25% off sale. As long as they’re not raising their prices by more than 25%, that would still be a good deal.
100th Anniversary of Akira Kurosawa’s Birth
Cool. Lots of Kurosawa on TCM this month. My dad was a big Kurosawa fan. If he was still around, I bet he would have called me tonight to tell me that Seven Samurai was on.
I think I had a pretty productive day, for a Saturday. I got my laundry done, then drove down to Whiting. Down there, I shoveled snow, packed up all my Mom’s clothes and got them into a donation box, threw away two large garbage bags full of stuff, went through the pantry, threw some bad stuff out and bagged up some good stuff to bring back home, then found all my Dad’s old slides and bagged them up to take home.
After I got home, I went through all the slides, counted them up, got them into a big box, and sent them off to ScanCafe. I had about 700 slides, so it’s going to cost me around $250 to get them all scanned in. Most were 35mm, but some were an odd format that’s going to cost a bit extra to scan. Once I get the scanned images back on DVD, I’m planning on uploading a bunch of them to Flickr. Maybe not all 700, but who knows. Just looking at a small sampling of the slides, my Dad seems to have quite a few really old slides that I don’t remember ever having seen before, some of them going back to the 40’s, I think.
The way things have been going over the last five or six months, I’ve fallen out of a lot of my usual habits. Things are settling down enough now that I’m trying to reestablish some good habits. I actually got on my exercise bike today, if only for about 10 minutes. And, for the first time in quite a while, I set up my coffee maker tonight so the coffee will be ready for me when I get out of the shower tomorrow. I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of cooking for myself, and avoiding take-out food, with some success. I didn’t get to the supermarket last weekend, since I was sick, so I really need to get out now and pick up some food for the rest of this week.
Ever since Dad went into the hospital back in late August, I’ve also made a few other random changes to long-standing habits that aren’t particularly consequential, but are a little interesting (at least to me). I completely lost interest in sci-fi TV shows for quite a while, for instance. I’m getting back into that habit, having now caught up on all the episodes of Stargate Universe and Sanctuary that had piled up on my DVR. And I stopped ordering comics every month from Westfield. I’ve been ordering from them every month for years now, but I’ve built up such a backlog of unread comics now, that it just didn’t make sense to buy any more. I haven’t read any comics since August, so I still have a big backlog. Once I really get interested again, I have enough reading material piled up to keep me going for about a year, probably. I don’t think I’ll ever get back in the habit of buying monthly comics, though. I’ll probably just stick with trade paperbacks, and occasionally picking up some back issues off eBay or at a con.
