Middle of a short week

 The snow was falling lightly and it was too beautiful not to take this picture of it.  I just love this State House and it is made of Hallowell Granite.  Spectacular in the morning, noon or evening - no matter when it is seen it is beautiful.

 These are the large clips we have to use to hold the pages down so that we can capture the images.

 Our trusty spirit level that helps us know if the pages are level or not and if they are level, then the book is in focus.  Focus us the biggest problem of them all.

Bill hard at work - well! probably looking at the football scores because he is using my computer...............

The middle of the week is upon us and it does not seem to be real.  We had Monday off due to the Archives being closed for the day and so we have a 4 day week instead of a 5 day week and it also has put us out of sync.  I guess it just seems to make life appear  to be going at a faster pace than it really is.  While we were at the archives this morning, we had the computer connected to the internet and Sara joined us by Skype.  Lyla was very proud of herself at the doctors by not crying when they took out the staples in her head.  She is one tough little cookie that kid and she has to be because she is doing her best to keep up with her older brothers.

We had so much rain last night that all the snow is melted off the ground.  Now we can see where the snow removal people took liberties with the plow and they scraped up some of the grass.  Grass is such a commodity in Arizona that we think twice before we even walk on it but here they seem to not care about that – they just scrape it up and hope that next year it will grow back.  Art the archiver told us that the wind blew a lot last night but we were so tired, I guess we did not wake at all for the event.

We have finished up on the really big books for Knox County and it was a real job to do that.  We had to capture these large books on top of the cradle and we had to use bulldog clips etc. to hold down the pages so that we could be in focus.  We will not know if we were successful in this or not until we turn in the shuttle this week.  If they fail, it will be difficult to get the momentum to go through it one more time.  It really is a difficult job doing these very thick books.  They are around 3 inches thick, and they only have one side of the page printed on and to keep t hem from moving, we have to put these very large clips on them and even then I do not know how successful we have been.  We had to make the camera higher to accommodate the books which are 16 ½ inches tall and do not fit on the cradle.  We adopted the method of doing a spirit level check every 5 pages and a complete focus check every 50 pages.  I just hope that it is enough.  At least they cannot say we did not give it our best shot.

We took down the Christmas Tree – now the apartment really looks bare.  We cannot really put up pictures because this is not our own property and the real reason is that we don’t have any pictures to start with……….go figure.