Takeout tasking

After breakfast this morning Jasmine and I took our cameras for a walk to Thompson's Park to check out the nesting moorhens. The nest is still there and the couple take it in turns to sit on the nest and search for leaves and twigs to add to it, nor feed each other morsels. Jasmine caught sight of a clutch of several eggs, maybe four or five. It's rare to get a glimpse of the whole clutch, only when the nesting bird shifts position or reaches out to receive food from the other. I got several photos with my Sony HX50 that I was pleased with, and Jasmine even more. Then Jas and Clare went into town and caught the river ferry down to the Bay for a visit to the Senedd, the Millennium Centre, and a posh Ice Cream shop! I wasn't feeling up to a trip, and I had a job that needed to be started. 

Google is closing its archive facility next month and has sent a notification about downloading archived content if you want to keep it with Google Takeout. This includes all photos, videos, blogs, emails etc I have been meaning to do this with my blog for ages, so that I'm not reliant on Blogger for entries reaching back as far as 2006. I have this idea of taking the best of my writing from the four years of City Centre redevelopment until I retired, to see if I could turn it into a publishable memoir using the photos I took. Google takeout tells me there's 130GB of content, and it's in 66 separate archive files of 2GB. It'll be a mammoth task sorting through them all and organising it chronologically. Downloading and saving to backup drive will take 10-12 hours of machine minding spread over days.

Sister June sent a present for Jasmine plus some photo slides of our Dad she'd not seen before, which had dropped out of a stored package. I think they are Kodak 110 Ektachrome, a size I'd not seen before. There were three of them with coloured images on them. Mounting such tiny objects for scanning was a fiddly task, using a 34mm slide holder. 

The images were visible to the naked eye, but only one scanned produced a decent image. The other two scans were so terribly dark that the images when edited were pixellated so badly their only use was to identify the location where they were taken, outside our family home in Ystrad Mynach. The third one was, I believe taken at Thornhill Crematorium, after my Grandfather's funeral, but all on the same day, as Dad was wearing his bowler hat and dark suit. So sad to think that within eighteen months of those pictures he too would die, aged just sixty seven. It seems that 110 film was of notoriously poor quality, and maybe the underexposed ones which had visible images on them couldn't be scanned like the other one because the surface didn't reflect light adequately.

I cooked supper for us, prepared for tomorrow morning's funeral and received a emailed eulogy for next week's funeral. Good to have everything ready nice and early. Then went for a walk as the sun was setting. Amazing to think that it's the longest day tomorrow.