Marty's Travels

My house has wheels

Hanging in PT

The color of the day around here is white. It’s a combination of fruit trees (apple, mainly) and ocean spray, a completely nondescript plant unless it is blooming. Some years they all seem to bloom at once, which is spectacular along the roadside, but usually the show is spread out over weeks. That looks like this year. Yellow is coming on fast, lupine and Scotch broom.

The Fruit Stand has opened this year, this time in a real building rather than a tent or shack. I’ve patronized them for ten years because they operate like the fruit stands I knew as a child in Yakima, and because they make their own runs to Yakima to get the produce I grew up with. They are rowing upstream around here, this being a fanatical local and organic type of community. This is May, proper asparagus comes from eastern Washington, and it could never be grown locally or organically.

It’s been wet lately. So, to kill time I’ve been dealing with slides and 8mm films that my dad took. Picture number one is his collection is my baby picture, and they go into the 60’s.

I scanned the slides myself by buying a gadget from Amazon that worked fairly well for a low price. If you want perfection on a slide, time and expense are very high; all I wanted is kind of a “proof sheet”, digital images that can be browsed on a computer. Turned out well, but you’d need to re-scan if you wanted a quality reproduction of a slide.

The films I turned over to a local guy with the machinery for doing the job. Home movies from the 60’s really suck. I say that from 2017 looking back to the technology that was in my family’s hands 55 years ago. Quite different from the youtube environment today.

The content of these films (a fraction of what dad took) will be of huge interest to my nieces and nephews, despite the poor quality…