Retirement

I have hardly done any writing this week.  I reckon I have a good excuse.  Even if my excuse was not good, it does not matter.  I just have not had time.
As most know, Merril is retiring in a few weeks.  She asked if I could digitize her photos.  We are talking 40 years of work life here.  A lot of people do not have pictures.  Merril does.  Well there would be over to 1,000 anyway.
A good number are in an album she has.  I have a good program called Auto Splitter.  It enables is a person to scan pictures to a usb.  What I need to do is put photos on the glass and scan them.  Because of the size of the pictures, I can only scan three at a time from the album.  I need to change the default setting to scan to jpeg because it defaults to pdf.  Once scanned to the usb, I can take it to my computer and open auto splitter. My computer is old and getting slower and slower.  I may have been 21 when I started typing this.  I wasn’t though.
Auto Splitter splits up the three photos I have on the glass.  Sometimes it gets it wrong, and I can manipulate the splits and make it right.  I then tidy up the pictures using another progam.  Two thirds of the pictures I need to rotate so people do not appear to be from the “on their side” tribe.  Often I have found I need to crop the picture as well.  I do less of that now, as I have discovered that on many occasions I can just move the picture for it to be right.
As I say, many pictures are in the album.  There are two things that make that slower than it might have been.  A number of the pictures have a separate piece of paper with names on them.  The separate piece of paper needs to be put aside while the photo is scanned, but returned to the top of the correct photo.  There are people’s names on the piece of paper.  That to me is a good thing, in that so often I look at a photo and have no idea who is in it.  Mostly the name would mean nothing to me, but for historical reasons it would be good to know, and someone is sure to know the name if given it.  The other thing that slows me down, is that a number of the photos have been glued in with double sided tape.  Merril has said just take them out.  She did a few and I have done the rest.  It is not pretty but I have not spoiled any photos.  The worst is having it glued right up the back.  Fortunately my hand is small.  If it were larger, havoc could be wreaked.
I have given myself until Friday to complete this.  I have found with projects, they often take as long as you have got.  For example, if I set the middle of next month as the finish date for this, I reckon it would take me that long.  I want to do it and walk away.  I have heaps of other things on the go right now.
As with all things though, I do not want to compromise quality because of haste.   I want it done and done right.  That is a challenge, and some pictures may need to be redone.  Still, I think that is a small price to pay for a life time of work.