further observations of Maine and the digitizing

 this tree was in front of the dunkin donuts shop and was too beautiful to pass up.  Love the GOLD!

 these above 5 houses were on the street I chose and they were remarkable for being in such good preservation.  The date on one of them was 1865.

 Three pictures of the steeple - tried to take one with it standing straight.........not successful.  Loved the Red front door to the church.

 Loved the colors of the foliage below.

 this house was interesting in that the fire escape is out of the window on the top floor.  but you would have to jump to the ground from there except that someone has put a blue ladder up for you.........hope that if there is a fire that the blue ladder is still there, though I think it might be difficult getting out the window at the top to get onto the fire escape that decorates the front aspect of this house.

 this is a fuse box in the room where we work.  We try to stay away at least 3. feet.

This morning when we went out to the car, it was only covered in a heavy dew and no ice to scrape.  That was wonderful. But we will have to buy another ice scraper soon because the ice and snow are coming.    It is like a huge threat hanging over our heads and the locals do not make things easier for us either.  They threaten us with the ice and snow every time they see us.  It was actually quite nice today.

As we drove out this morning, my eye fell on a lady motorcyclist.  She had on a helmet but no visor on it so it must have been very cold on her face as she rode the bike.  She also had on leggings that were tied to her belt from the thigh area.  She had on a heavy leather coat and she looked quite happy to be riding her motorbike but I doubt if I would willingly ride one of those machines – there is no protection whatsoever.  The item that jogged my memory more than anything were her motorcycle boots.  When I went to the first heart doctor (a very overweight lady), I noticed that she wore motorcycle boots.  She had very long, very curly hair with little hairpins like Lyla wears in her hair, and she always wore scrubs with a lab coat and these motorcycle boots.  A man in the waiting room was telling me that he had seen this doctor on her Harley Davidson motoring down the highway with her hair flying to the wind.  She moved out of town soon after I started with her and fortunately for me, circumstances were such that I was treated at Mayo Clinic and my heart condition was resolved;  A much better deal than Prescott.

I wanted to find the Weight Watchers meeting place and since it was a really nice day, I decided to walk to the church where it is held.  The houses in Augusta are really wonderful – and most of the ones downtown date from the mid 1800’s or earlier,  and sport signs that announce that fact to the world.  The church where the meeting is held is made of Hallowell Granite.  I met a man in the pathway whom I took for being the pastor, but he told me he was a masonry inspector and he was there checking on the masonry of the church.  It is a pretty little church and they don’t make them like this anymore.  Most of the churches here are wooden structures that are quite charming.

The digitizing is going along and is hard work.  We are very careful to do it as we were trained, but our first batch of submissions passed well and the second batch – not so lucky.  We submitted 14 folders (meaning fourteen books digitized) and 10 were acceptable and 4 were not.)  The note said that they were blurred.  I will just have to take their word for it that they were blurred images, my eyes are not so good anymore and I cannot tell what is blurred and what is not.  So we have 4 x 500 pages to rework.  Well at least I get in exercise operating the “beast machine” and the repetitive action of using it so far has not caused my shoulder to ache and pushing down on the handle firmly causes me to flex my upper body muscles so it is a workout of sorts.  But having to rework stuff is not fun – means that the first attempt is essentially wasted time and time is not a renewable resource , commodity or quantity.  At least I can tell them that I tried my best and my best is all that is asked.  Hope the rework meets approval.

We are now working in the 1920-1930 era and the quality of the paper in these books is better than the earlier decade we worked with.  Not so much bleed through but the latest books have been type written.  Oh, I do remember learning to type on the Olivetti and Royal typewriters at Harristown High School.  They were brutes that challenged our wrists to carpal tunnel causing degree, broke our fingernails and tested our finger strength and ligaments to the max.  It was an all or nothing experience to learn touch typing and errors were a bear – had to use this abrasive eraser that usually tore holes in the typing paper (which was very thin and not good quality at all).  Later on they had Whiteout but not while I was in high school…..and we had to be letter perfect as well.  So, as I examine these typed images, I am wondering how they did it because it does not appear that they folded the pages in half to be able to use a regular 12 inch carriage but they must have had a 24inch carriage and how did they type to within ¼ inch of the bottom of the page without it going skeewampus?  These are questions I am going to ask the archivist – he knows everything.  These pages are not typeset because I have seen where there have been erasures and corrections made.

As we work with the digitizing, sorry words jump off the page.  Abuse, cruelty and others I have mentioned before, but one stood out yesterday that I had not seen before – the crime of blasphemy.  Now I know that there are some funny laws on books here and there, but to be tried for blasphemy in the early 1910-1920 years seems rather strange.  It appears that a Lithuanian came into town and began preaching that there is no such thing as the Immaculate Conception – that in his book it had to be a Jewish man named Joseph who fathered Jesus and that there is no God, no Jesus and no Holy Ghost.  The community was so incensed by his anti Christ actions, that they hauled him into court.  Apparently he carried on with his diatribe in the court room and the jurors were horrified at his pronouncements and they found him guilty of blasphemy.  He did not show up for sentencing so his bond was turned over to the general fund of the court.  There have been cases of public lewdness, drunkenness, and many other social ills before the court but this one for blasphemy takes the cake.

It makes me want to ask the question, “Hey wait a minute.  Who’s runnin’ this show anyway?”; after all, is Maine not the state where the Ku Klux Klan has its roots (reputedly started by the French Catholics from Canada according to Art the Archiver),  before making its infamous actions public in the Southern States?  Is not Maine the state where they began the Prohibition movement?  Is not this the state where Walden Pond and civil disobedience became a staple of existence after Thoreau wrote his treatise “Into the Woods” here in Maine?  So why is blasphemy such a heinous crime compared to other things that have been spawned in this state?  It should be noted that the Occupy Maine Movement does not seem to be attracting adherents and their camp still seems very small and untidy in the city park.  I wonder how hardy they will be when the winter really gets underway?  Do they go home to their comfortable homes during the day to bathe etc. and who is working to pay their bills, for surely their everyday expenses must be mounting….and if  you fail to pay your bills, you really will have to stay in a tent on the Capitol Lawn……….

In one of the volumes, a typewritten volume at that, there was a blotter.  I have not seen blotting paper since grade school or high school.  When we used pens and ink (whether we used an inkwell or a fountain pen that held its own supply of ink that was loaded from the inkwell), we had to have this absorbent paper called blotting paper.  Imagine my surprise to see this little 2x5 inch blotter from a commercial supplier fall out of the book.  After all, in the age of typewriters, who needs a blotter?  I have used one of these carpal tunnel producing, hand and finger tendon challenging, finger nail breaking  typewriters on which you had to pound with force to produce print on paper and it presented a challenge when computers came along – no need to pound heavily and how many computer keyboards were ruined by such abuse by typewriter trained clerks etc.

Thursday morning:  I did not get the blog done last night.  Too many things else to do including taking the missionary elders on a missionary visit to some new contacts.  Both of the contacts were not home when we went to visit them and while outside one of the doors, the missionary phoned the contact and we could hear the cell phone ringing inside the apartment, but no one came to the door.  As we were driving away, his cell phone rang and it was the contact.  His excuse for not answering the door was that he was entertaining a lady friend who did not want to be bothered by anything religious, so he made a return appointment for next week when she would not be there.  When I was on my mission in Japan, we asked the contacts we met on the street to come to the church to be taught and most times they came.  However, we did have our fair share of no shows as well.  Things of an eternal nature do not appeal to all people, just to some.

One of the other archivists came into the digitizing room this morning and gave us a copy of a letter signed by Brigham Young, dated Nauvoo, Missouri, April 25^th, 1845 asking for asylum for the members of the church in the State of Maine.  As it so happened, the members of the church were dislodged from Missouri, and made the tortuous trek to Utah in the miserable winter weather for which they were unprepared.  The mobs of Missouri would not let them stay till winter was over and make the trek in the spring but forced them out into the winter weather to cross the Mississippi river and let them fend for themselves on the frozen prairie as they trekked west and eventually founded Salt Lake city, Utah.  The archivist said that President Brigham Young had petitioned every state for asylum for the members of the church.

Art the archiver came into the room this morning and added to our knowledge base of Maine.  He said that some of the more famous residents have been Hannibal Hamlin, Margaret Chase Smith, Thomas Brackett Smith who said to Theodore Roosevelt , “Theodore, your original discovery of the Ten commandments is astounding” or words to that effect.  Ear muffs were invented in Maine and Hiram Maxim created the automatic gun.  Redds Eats in Wiscasset is famous the world over for Lobster rolls, and Maine is also famous for blueberries, maple syrup and is the first state of the USA to see the sunrise.  It also did not vote for Franklin Roosevelt .