I’m done with the second photo album (it didn’t have many pics in it, but luckily they were in color). My scanner has this cool feature where you can just put an assload of photos on the scan bed and it automatically crops them and puts them in separate photoshop documents. Here is a picture of my mom when she was in Australia. Isn’t that the cutest thing you have ever seen?

Aaaand I’m done with the first photo album. One hundred and thirty one pictures.

131.

Every single one tediously cropped out.

But at least I finished one album, my goal is to do one album a day until they are all done.

Right now, this seems more a fantasy than an actual plan:

I want to post them all on my Flickr account, but no high-speed. I need to:

a) mod my Mac Mini into my car and drive over to RayJen’s (easy, except for I don’t have an LCD)

b) wait until Sacramento to upload all these pics.

Hmm…I could put them on a CD and upload them at the library, possibly. Hmm.

I’m scanning them all in as 600 dpi TIFFs, so I could make enlargements if I wanted to. A lot of them are covered in dust and such which would require a lot of Photoshopping to fix. However, I can fix them, so it’s worth saving them now before they get all moldified in my dad’s closet.

Well, I’m going to kick back and watch some Aqua Teen Hungerforce while I regain my strength. before I go, here are a few choice photos from the first photo album:

My dad.

My dad’s sister, Ann. She died of cancer when her son Michael was only a little boy. Ann was also a Buddhist. “She was a nice lady,” my mom told me today, “but she chanted a lot.”

Meticulously archiving all these dead people seems like it might be an ultimately pointless struggle. What do you think?

My god. There are…let’s see…around eight photo albums I found in the closet. Scanning them is going to be a massive undertaking. Well, I’d better get started.

I feel like I’m a detective, piecing together fragments of lives that should have some meaning to me. It’s odd.

Dial-up is weird.

I am actually identifying with those people that go “Oh, I don’t need the Internet.” It’s scary.

An hour after leaving work, I’ve visited a grand total of six web pages, most of which didn’t load with images on them. Annoyed, I went out and played with my dad’s dog, and now I’m considering making myself a smoothie. The Net just seems so…antiquated…when you’re on dial-up. I wonder what kind of Web experience we will have when everyone has fiber-optic!

Damn, I meant to stop by the library on the way home and use their Internet. As I suspected, Measure A didn’t pass, yet again. Nobody cares about the libraries here. Even my dad voted against it (he’s borderline illiterate). Well, now that I think about it, I’m perplexed that I can actually form sentences with half of my genome coming from him.

My big project for today can only begin once my brand new scanner arrives. It’s scheduled for delivery for today, and is out on the truck, according to the website. The plan is to archive all the family photos from the albums that my dad has onto my computer, so that I won’t have to wait until he dies to see them all again. It’s also a wealth of photographic information on my father, of whom I know little about.

All I know about my dad:

Born somewhere in SoCal in the forties

His mom divorced his dad and married some other guy

She and the new hubby worked at an air force base near there

In one anedote, my dad would drive around in the fields with his friends in Sac (it used to be rural)

He became a fisherman, and was an avid drinker (my mother says they called him the Viking because he would get trashed and pick up barmaids and like carry them around over his shoulders)

One time at dinner he said that he used to do amphetamines for fun.

Then he met my mom. She worked in the commercial fising industry for many years. This is actually a funny story… no wait… did I say funny? I meant pathetic.

My mother and her friend Reese (I know that is not the correct spelling, as she is Swiss) were living in San Francisco, in the Haight-Asbury district. Reese was going out with my dad at the time. He lived in Sausalito, and Reese would ride a bike all the way from the peninsula over the Golden Gate Bridge to see him. Then she got pregnant. My dad refused to admit that it was his child, and insisted that he was sterile from a motorcycle accident. After they broke up, him and my mom started going out. Well, after a year or so my mom and I were living together and my Grandpa (on my mom’s side) was coming to visit, and my mom said that it would have looked weird, so she proposed that they get married.

So that’s about all I know about my dad’s life before he met my mom.

When I open those photo albums, it’s like evidence that he’s not an alien from planet Emotional Retardation. I’m going to put all the photos into a special album and tag them all with “historical” or something like that. With my luck, it’s going to show up at 5 PM.

Well, my other task for today was to apply for the fee waiver. I should do that now.