Monday, June 06, 2016

In which we assemble some odds and ends

I wrote up an article on how to be a Danish parent today. This is why I’m not writing other stuff. There’s just so much juice in the carrot, as they say.

Summer hours have hit the DJ now that June has arrived. There is a bit of disagreement over the way to do it. Personally, I go for the half Friday every week approach, since I can turn that half day into a full day of something and thus get three-day weekends all summer. I think this comes from the debate life style, which always seemed to start at noon on Friday. Others prefer the full-day-off approach every other week. Sure, it’s a whole day, but most people seem to use it to do chores. Chores? Chores are those things you put off, not that you do on your day off. Very misguided, if you ask me.

Not that I did anything all that exciting this weekend. I have given myself the project of taking all my old photo books and scanning the important pix (inevitably of people or, occasionally, highly regarded cats) so that we can preserve them for the ages. This is, of course, a real-time project, that requires not only loading the scanner but then fixing the pictures. I managed to link Apple’s Photos app to an editing app called Affinity, which does a really nice job of improving things with various levels of hands on and off. I used to use Photoshop Elements but it disappeared in one of my hardware upgrades. Whatever. Photos itself is good for cropping and tilting and not much else, although that’s often enough with pictures I take now. But getting some of these faded gems into something viewable is a different issue. Once or twice I’ve simply thrown up my hands and transferred to black and white, but mostly I’ve been settling for a nice string of gradations of beige. I’m still in the 70s. Maybe I’ll post one or two if I think they’re worth sharing beyond the gene pool.


Meanwhile we’ve managed to settle Penn down a bit. No Lexington, sigh, given that it cost a million bucks or so for the weekend but we will have Kaz, which means that the tab room can run on the debate side. The Pennies have some ideas about speech, and if we can wrangle in the Paginator and the Monocle, we’ll be in great shape. Of course, I’m only in it for the cheesesteak lunch on Saturday and the crepe brunch on Sunday. No one has ever accused me of having the wrong priorities.

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