My Grandparents' Living Room

Just another close-up of one of our neighborhood rose-ringed parakeets. They may be invasive, and they're certainly loud, but they're also really beautiful, aren't they? And they do love those suet balls, even though they drop a lot of the suet on the ground. The pigeons and starlings will gather beneath the parakeets whenever they're on the feeder, waiting for food to fall.

I was pretty much a homebody yesterday. I finished my sunflower book and spent most of the day looking at slides. I didn't get through the whole pile -- I still have quite a few to go. My method is to give every slide a glance through my hand-held viewer, and whatever seems utterly worthless -- too blurry, too dark, too damaged, too boring -- goes into a pile. I'll put those in a bag and throw them in the closet, possibly on the way to being tossed permanently. (I haven't decided yet.)

One photographer in this batch took particularly bad slides. I think there must have been something wrong with his camera -- or perhaps his vision. They are laughably out of focus.

Anyway, the rest I'm going to sort into slides of similar theme or by photographer, if I can tell who that is. Then I'll go through them all again and decide what's worth scanning.

I say scanning, but what I'm actually going to try is photographing the slides. I ordered a camera extension that allows me to mount each slide on my Canon camera, and with an even source of white light, I can take a high-resolution picture of it. We'll see how well that works. The camera piece wasn't very expensive so I thought it might be a better option than buying a new scanner.

This photo (above) has nothing to do with the slides. Not too long ago, blogger Ed posted some pictures of interiors where his ancestors lived. It got me thinking, "Don't I have a picture of my grandparents' apartment somewhere?" I dug through my digital archives and found the photo I remembered -- this one, which shows the apartment where my mother's parents lived in Massachusetts shortly after their marriage in 1929.

It's not a great photo but in my experience, people didn't often take pictures of the interiors of their own homes during this era. There aren't many pictures like this, in other words!

I own two items clearly visible in the photo.

I think this beige vase was an engagement or wedding present to my grandparents. You can see it on the drop-leaf table to the left of the photo, holding what looks like a bouquet of lilacs. Now it's on the windowsill in our bedroom. It has a cryptic mark -- B17 or possibly 817 on the bottom -- but no manufacturer name, and I have tried for years to figure out who made it and whether it has any value. Google Image Search returns similar-looking vases, but none quite exactly the same. (Addendum: I found this one on eBay, a different color but the same shape and marking, said to be Zanesville pottery from Ohio. Bingo!)

My grandmother gave me this vase when I was in high school. You can also see it in the pictures of my childhood bedroom I posted several years ago. (No cracks about the flowery drapes, which my parents bought!)

I also own these bookends, which are on the same table as the vase in the photo above. My grandmother had these in her living room all her adult life, and I took them after she died in 1989. The diary behind the elephant is this one.

I'm familiar with the other furniture in the photo, which went to various relatives after my grandmother died. That lamp was in the upstairs bedroom of her house for years -- the room where my brother and I always stayed on our visits. No idea where it is now, if it even still exists.

Anyway, I'll be sorting more slides today and hopefully I'll get out for a walk!