Thursday 09/02/2021
So no aerobics this morning, I need to let my pulled muscles heal. Off to the Yosemite drive warehouse for a day of museum work. I was first tasked with replacing two catalog records. Two items from a large donation had been cataloged by other volunteers. The evidence of that was clear: they had bar-code tags hanging on them, and they had been photographed and stored on shelves. But there were no catalog records in the database. Another mystery of Mimsy, the cataloging software we’ve been using for more than a decade.
Anyway, I spent the morning recreating the catalog records for these two items. After lunch I did something new, because I admitted to knowing PhotoShop. The photos of objects are taken against a white cloth background, but some recent ones have had a lot of shadows and wrinkles. So Aurora the curator had started using PS to drop out the background entirely, leaving the object itself isolated in a pure blank white field. She asked if I wanted to do some of that. Sure, why not. So I spent the afternoon doing that: carefully select just the object; invert the selection; hit delete; check for mistakes; save.
Conversation at dinner was gloomy. Between (a) the fires burning into the Tahoe basin (an area everyone here knows) (b) the flash flooding in New York and New Jersey (c) the hurricane hit on New Orleans (d) the Texas abortion law (e) the withdrawal from Afghanistan (f) the on-going Covid pandemic and the latest variants — everyone is afflicted with a general sense of doom and gloom. We’re all fucked, basically, and we are just waiting for the next catastrophe.
Codgerville 