There were 454 of them. It had been a three day weekend on one hand, but on the other, I hadn't worked continuously. That finished all of the photos that had been scanned over Christmas break.
At that point, the old scanning sleeve was scratched enough that the scanner was scanning the scratches more than the pictures, so I had to stop. I haven't been able to pry replacement sleeves out of either the manufacturer or Kodak. Their online customer service sucks.
I tried buying a new scanner, but can't find a simple one, like the old one at any local store. I tried online and found a larger version of the little scanner I was using. I just sent it back. The note I made on Facebook about it reads:
Bought a new scanner. Was all excited. Had hundreds of photos queued up to be scanned. Sucker doesn't work. Sending back. Repacking photos. Damn.
There is a picture. The problem with the scanner was that it wouldn't pull the photos through. So my Dear Son tried pushing them through, to see if that would work.
At least if they ever get the rollers to work, the scan part works fine.
I still have no scanner, so I've been pre-sorting and sometimes labeling more photos. There are still boxes and boxes in the garage.
The good news is that I've discovered that the best way to store the pictures is in index card archive boxes. The bad news is that I now have a box full of unscanned photos and no scanner. And for most of it, what I really need is just a new sleeve.
But that's not what I came here to say. I came to share the glee of finding 9 packets of pictures that could be thrown away with only the mildest of guilt. Wheee. They were Gerry's photos.
Gerry was my Mom's second husband. The photos didn't get thrown away automatically just because they were his. They got tossed because he would take a lot of pictures of, say, the view from someplace he had visited or from the property where he would build his house. But it wouldn't be labeled, so it would just be a bunch of overexposed trees, with a few fronts of trucks thrown in.
No people + no labels usually gets chucked no matter who took them. Oh, there was also a dead deer on a mule and what looked like damaged furniture. I'm guessing the first was from a hunting trip and the second was evidence for a claim against a moving company. Not much use for posterity, especially with no smiling hunters in any shot.
The pictures of fish all have smiling fishermen holding them. The ones with Gerry in them are being kept for now. I may toss them later, but I won't be able to toss them with guilt-free glee. And that's what I experienced last night, folks. Nearly guilt-free glee.
