what should I write about here? no blogging spew to be had, not that I really care about putting something down each day, hardly have done that in the history of this whole work.
spending time on the archive. looking through old 16mm family films. there are more than 4,000 feet of silent Kodachrome from the 1950’s. mostly Alaska. researching the telecine process going from film to digital video. want to get them all transferred so that folks in the family can actually see them. there used to be a 16mm editing console (manual splicing and viewing unit), but that has long since made its way to the Goodwill or so. so I manually spliced the remaining 100 foot reels together onto 400 foot reels, there are ten or twelve of those along with “The Alaska Movie,” as we call it. a 1600-foot behemoth 45-minute-or-so series of fragments of hunting polar bear by air, Inuit dancers, glacier break-ups, family parties, sledding, trailing moose in the car, panning gold, and on and on.
part of this increasing tendency to archive these days. bought archival storage cases for all Dad’s and Aunt Mary’s slides, amounting to about 7,000 or so. numbered boxes for much of my own small archive of negatives, prints, and other art stuff. seems spurious, out of all the things to do in the world.
so cycling 20 miles in the 100+F heat seems the other thing to do. winds make the difference. with the wind downhill, against uphill.
much time spent taking Dad in for his almost daily hospital visits to get his leg wound looked after. really shocking. shows how much more difficult it is for the body to heal as it ages. eventually there is not enough energy turn-around to bring order back to the system.