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Tuesday, March 19 The morning arrived with clouds rolling in, actually warming things up after the cold night. Being as far as south as we are in New Zealand, there are occasional south-westers, where wind right off of Antarctica blows up north, across the islands of New Zealand and freezes everything and everybody. Well, maybe not that cold, but it was a bizarrely different night than the previous one. We all woke up slowly, having gotten to bed late, we took our time getting going. Today was a pretty peaceful day, Richard and Granny Stanton pretty well spent the entire day pouring through old family photographs and talking about her life, her parents life and her grandparents life. This is pretty much the same thing they did the last time Richard and Stacy visited, but there was a difference. Granny Stanton's brother Mervyn had fallen very ill and was in full time care in the hospital. Much of Mervyn's photographs and other family artifacts were now at Granny Stantons. As planned after the last trip, Richard brought a scanner with him - picked up at the new Frye's in Industrial City, California (and on opening day no less). The scanner is USB powered, avoiding the issues of getting adapters that work with 240 volts. While the girls went for wanders around Levin, Richard and Granny Stanton went page by page through dozens of photo albums, talking about family history. Richard scanned numerous photographs at as high a resolution as the computer could stand. He also took copious notes, OCRed a number of family history documents and made MP3 records of his grandmother's stories. Unfortunately, the scanned photographs are in TIF format, and the tools installed in Windows XP and Office XP don't convert from TIF to JPEG well. When we're home, PhotoShop will be deployed to do a good job of converting and cleaning up the photographs. In the meantime, here's a small sample of the photos found: Although not a particularly busy day, the intense concentration of listening, understanding and recording family history quite exhausted both Granny Stanton and Richard - they were first to bed, even before the kids. The next day the family would take a day trip out of Levin. |