Monday 09/12/2022
The monthly Residents Association meeting was at 9am. I went to the auditorium at 7:45 and as usual found stuff to move. I put the whiteboard to one side so I could move the piano off the stage, set up a table for the secretary, bring the podium up from the floor to the stage, etc.
The RA meeting is David G’s event, he’s been doing it a long time, but there were several glitches this time, mostly to do with various people’s slides. They didn’t get to him, or whatever. So things had to be delayed or taken out of sequence, and a lot of fiddling around on computers occurred. So annoying and distressing.
At 12:30 Harriet arrived. The nominal excuse for this was that she needs an iPad, and the Gift Shop had an iPad that I cleaned up and reset some time ago. So she agreed to buy it for $100, and I bought her lunch. I invited Lennie and Carolyn as well, and it turned out very well because, unbeknownst to me, all three had graduated from Wellesley!
After Harriet left I went down to FOPAL and did my post-sale cleanup. I counted the books remaining, and I went through all the shelves and sent those books that had seen at least 4 sales — which would be the ones with my datecode for June or earlier — off to the bargain room. Four boxes of them.
This was the day of the monthly “mixer”, in which the tables in one part of the dining room are set aside and you can take a number at random from a hat as you come in. That gives you your table number and so you sit with 3 or 4 other people chosen at random. I ended up the first at table 35, with Mary Ann, Lois and Michelle, all people I already knew well, so not much of an adventure although pleasant enough.
After supper I printed the first picture of what I plan will be a series of prints of our pictures of the Bridges of the Thames. We took those pics as Ektachrome slides in 1975-77. Around 1990, give or take, I borrowed an enlarger from Bill Pawek and made photo prints of the best of them. We had those around the house for a while. I scanned the slides in around 2005. Now I plan to reprint them with modern equipment.
I scanned the slides at a decent resolution but they aren’t quite high-res enough to make good prints at the 11×14 or 11×17 size I want. So I bought some digital toys from Topaz Labs. Really quite amazing software for de-noising, and for up-scaling, images. So I can take one of my 2600×1800 pixel scanned images and double it in size with no loss of quality at all, and print it at 11×14 inches. Looks great.
Codgerville 