A Broken Ring

I spent yesterday morning going through my latest Big Bag O' Slides. I dumped them all out on the dining room table and I'm separating them into three piles. Those that are too dark, blurry, overexposed or damaged go into "Trash." Those that don't thrill me go into "Second Look," which means I'll go through them again more slowly -- some may eventually get scanned but most will simply be stored. And those that I immediately like go into "Winners," which means they're almost certain to be scanned, though on second look some will get bumped back down into storage for one reason or another.

Some of the "Winners" are actually multiple shots of the same thing. For example, I found a funny picture of a woman leaning backwards against the wind on a mountain or cliff top. I set it aside, but then as I sorted I came across two more of the same woman, each one getting closer to her. Obviously I won't scan all three of them. I'll pick the best and store the other two.

I always struggle with what to do when I come across a picture of, say, daffodils in a garden. It's not interesting enough to scan, and it says nothing about its time period -- daffodils now look just like daffodils then. I'm tempted to just throw such pictures away, but I somehow can't bring myself to do it -- so I usually just stick them in the storage pile. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the boxes and boxes of mundane slides I own that don't merit scanning.

And "mundane" is the word for this whole bag, I gotta say. I'm about halfway through and I've only seen two or three shots that have made me go "Wow!" I think the box had been somewhat picked through. There are loads of boring landscapes, and some pictures that I just can't explain -- ocean waves, for example, or dark foliage. ("Trash!")

I still haven't figured out how I'm going to do the actual scanning.

Anyway, that was the bulk of my morning. I took the dog out for a walk in the afternoon. Her incision from her surgery is almost completely healed.

Above is a little DIY project of which I am somewhat proud. Our flat came with this wooden towel ring in one of the bathrooms, and the ring broke. Fixing it wasn't as easy as it looks, because it hangs from a mount that doesn't unscrew from the wall or open up. (In fact I'm not sure how it was manufactured in the first place!) To fix it, I had to glue the ring together while it was hanging from the mount. It has taken me months to get around to it, partly because until recently we didn't have the proper glue. I finally bought some Gorilla Glue and over the weekend I added glue to the broken ends of the ring, slipped half through the mount and attached the other half from below, and held the pieces together for about a minute while they set. Then I put rubber bands around it to hold the two pieces of the ring together for 48 hours or so. Thank GOD that's done now. You can see the seams in the wood ring but I don't care.

The dog is now doing her frantic rolling-around-in-the-blankets morning routine, which means it's time for her walk!