So much for playing outside the house today. I resisted the pull, but eventually the house sucked us in and we ended up spending most of the day puttering around inside. We have four rooms we can use, because no further significant work is being done in them: dining room (where I’ve set up my office), living room (where we are stacking miscellaneous boxes that we need access to), the middle bedroom (our primary storage area), and Emma’s room. So we are spreading out and beginning to open a few boxes.

Handy Jerry came by around noon and solved our electrical woes. Turns out the painters didn’t tie off the electrical connections properly when they took down the ceiling fans. That was half the problem; the other half was caused by Handy Randy when he moved a bathroom fan switch and didn’t make a tight connection. I should send a bill to both parties splitting the $90 it cost to figure out the problem and resolve it. We also re-installed all the ceiling lights, wall sconces, and duct faces.

One project I’ve had on my list is to somehow deal with the two large boxes of photo prints we’ve been toting around for a decade. Remember the days before digital? Well, I’ve got plenty of souvenirs from that era, which are slowly deteriorating and never viewed. They just take up space in a storage area somwhere.

We’ll never get around to putting them in albums, so I figured if we had them all scanned we’d have them available on our computers. Then we would have them to view and enjoy anytime, even as we were traveling in the Airstream. I was planning to use ScanCafe to do the work. You just send them all your negatives and they scan them and put them up online for you to view. Then you pick the ones you want, and they burn them onto DVD for $0.19 per image.

Today I found the boxes of photos and cracked them open for the first time since 2000 (when I bought my first digital camera). I quickly discovered that we have waaaaay too many photos. There are approximately 4,000 negatives between the two boxes. ScanCafe will scan them all, but I have to pay for at least half of them whether I want the images or not.   That’s $380.

Looking a few sample packs of prints, Eleanor and I realized we don’t really want more than about 10% of them. The pictures are pretty lame — lots of photos of building our last house, generic pictures of flowers, sunsets, etc. Very few are the type of photo we want to save for posterity: images of people and special moments. The one below is an example of a keeper. That’s me on the left (pre-beard), with my friend Steve B, preparing to go flying on August 14, 1993, just before Eleanor and I got married. I don’t remember where we were going that day, but I do have a lot of fond memories of that airplane. It was our “Airstream” back then, and we flew it all over the northeast.

Our neighbor Carol popped by for a visit late in the afternoon and was suitably impressed by our progress in the last two days.   It just happened I was in the   storage area and dug up a gift box full of goodies that Brett sent us for Christmas, so we took it over the dining room table, shoved my office equipment out of the way, and had an impromptu buffet with Carol.   Crackers, smoked salmon, camembert cheese, cinnamon cashews, garlic toasts, stone ground mustard, green olives, and we added summer sausage, parmigiano reggiano cheese, and root beer.   So that was dinner in the new house.   A few Ghirardelli chocolates from the gift box made dessert, and then we made a fire of the excess packing paper and some scraps of a cut-down tree that I found in the backyard.

It is clear that we will never have a “move-in” day.   Like our Airstream life, entering this house is going to be a process.   We are moving in by degrees.   Each day a little symbolic step or two forward occurs.   Today, the first picture hung on a wall, and the first guest for dinner in the house.   Tomorrow, who knows?