A swift race with the proverbial Molasses in Winter syndrome is taking place at the Archives as of Today. Oh yes, the supervisor is here and he has set us a task that seems to be at best insurmountable and at worst, abject discouragement. You see, he wants us to be very fast at our digitizing but the books we have now are over 3 inches thick by 16 inches high and 12 inches wide. They will not fit in the cradle and if they do, the over extend at the sides and get stuck and pull and wiggle and I am sure that the one book that we did on this series is going to be a rework. Now that is a Christmas present that we always wanted. On top of that, the FedEx man came with two shuttles for us and we were really excited to open them and see what they held. One of them is not even ours and belongs to another digitizer in a different state. Now how’s that again? They get after us for errors and have zero tolerance for blurred images and focus problems, but we are expected to function with only one shuttle instead of two. I can hardly wait to see what is next.
What is next has already arrived. Our supervisor has been here two days and I have not slept for those two days due to anxiety over his visit. His rapid fire directions and questions have me totally rattled and I cannot answer his questions as fast as he desires and then I get a lecture about how we have had this all before and how can I not remember? Well, it is like this, when you get to be 68 you can remember what you did when you were a kid, like the clothes you wore to the school dance that your mother made and it did not fit because she was sure I would grow quickly enough that I would fit into it in two weeks – well even after two years I was not that big……….but it pays to be prepared. I can remember not wanting to eat my vegetables at dinner. I can even recall which of the vegetables I hated to eat – and that was most of them if not all of them. But ask me what I had for breakfast this morning and you’ll get a blank stare and a stock questioning answer of “We had breakfast?” I guess he is really a nice caring man who wants to keep his job, but he scares the beejeebers out of me because I do not ‘think computer’ that fast. Not raised in the computer generation to start with, so what do you really expect?
So it is “molasses in winter movement” that is trying to overtake the snails pace race to the finish. I refer to the new way to do these large books – which is one page at a time,and sitting on top of the cradle and not under the glass anymore. The next 7 books are only written on the right hand page and the left hand page is totally bereft of words and certainly no doodles of any kind and no hurriedly scribbled notes to help the typist to remember to put in certain paragraphs that were left out of the first presentation etc.etc.etc. We have these huge bulldog clips that grab the pages and anchor them down so that there are no bubbles, humps, gullies, or other distortion of the page. We have to use a sprit level to be sure that the surface is parallel with the camera mount and that it is perfectly flat and within focal range. To achieve this, one has to lean over the book, place the first clip, then smooth the page to accommodate the second clip and then the third clip. Take the spirit level and check vertically (top to bottom of the page) and then horizontally (from side to side of the page) before clicking capture. All throughout this maneuver we have to be ever vigilant that the page does not move, gully, bubble or hump and cause distortion. We have to be careful that the clip does not tear the pages (they are over 120 years old and the paper is brittle and has not rag content). In this race,” the molasses in winter is winning” I hate to lose to the gooey stuff, but I am. Peter even brought us a really fancy and very expensive little level that he used professionally in another job with his camera, but it is so tiny and so easy to lose that I put it back on the shelf and we use the 10inch spirit level from K-Mart and it works well. We also have to do a full focus every 30 or so pages. We may only get one book on the shuttle to Salt Lake City this week rather than 11 or 14 as in other weeks.
Had a phone call from Lloyd who works at the Verizon store. He asked if we (as a church) put much store in the 2012 end of the year calendar from the Maya………..of course not. We are directed by a Prophet of God and have no need for a Mayan Calendar. After all, each January, the tabloid in the Super market shouts the prophecies of Nostradamus and it is always gloom and doom from that camp. This year some 80+ yr old preacher said the world would end on March 21 – and when that did not happen, he reconfigured his calculations and came up with October 2011 – and that has passed as well. Guess he needs a new crystal ball or something. So I engaged Lloyd in a conversation that went something like this………..
”Lloyd, imagine I hold in my hand a glass sphere that contains all truth. What would happen if I took it outside your store and dropped it on the cement there?” He said, “well it would be in a million bits”. I asked him if he would be able to gather all the pieces of glass form the sphere and put it back together again? He said that the chances of it being restored back together complete are slim to none. I then had him agree with me that he would find shards of glass for a long time after that and that each shard represented a piece of truth. All truth can be circumscribed into one great whole. I suggested to him that throughout his life he would find pieces of truth and that it was his responsibility to embrace truth wherever he found it……………..gave him something to think about. I also challenged him to read the Book of Mormon and follow the challenge in the back of it which encourages people who read this book, to ponder, pray and ask God if it is true and they will get an answer. ‘By the power of the Holy ghost, ye may know the truth of all things ‘ is a scripture in the Book of Mormon. I do not know if he will follow through, but I told him that I would love to talk to him at a later date and he said he would do that.
Tonight we went caroling with the young people of the Ward and it was very cold but very much fun. We ended up at the chapel and the plan was originally to go into the neighborhood around the church and sing carols to the neighbors, but everyone was too cold to go back out and do that. So, we had milk and cookies and conversation. I saw the bishop and told him about Lloyd and he said, “Oh I already heard about your conversation.” I knew Augusta was smaller than Prescott, but I did not think for one minute that it was so small that one conversation I had with one person would already be known by the bishop.
After the archives we stopped at the YMCA so that I could do some walking. I have not been able to walk due to it being so dark when we leave the archives at 4pm and not much sun or light on the weekend that I can use between washing loads and shopping etc. We seemed to have a different group there today. There was a twenty-something Adonis in short shorts running full tilt around the track with a full backpack on his back and his Ipod blaring in his ears – I could hear him coming by his music before I could hear his heavy breathing. Some skinny kid from the high school was bounding like a Gazelle around the track and I was walking as fast as I could. In each corner of the room people doing exercises on mats – well it looked more like they were writhing in pain. One fellow had a heavy 20 pound weight on his back while he did pushups. Another seemed bent on turning himself into a human pretzel while in another corner an old man was doing some yoga and Pilates moves. Imagine my surprise upon turning a corner and finding him throwing himself to the floor as it someone had done a Judo move on him. He is the same person who walks clockwise around the track when the rules clearly ask that we walk counterclockwise. Must be some sort of Feng Shui thing or other that causes him to walk in this manner (Or maybe it is a death wish to be crashed into by the Gazelle racing around the track, or even by Adonis). Another older gentleman comes in and stands by the wall and lifts his arms up and then down a few times, stretches his arch muscles against the wall, then he goes over to the magazines and tears out the pages he wants. Three young women were there today and boy, were they ‘hotties’. Too bad that all but two men in the room were grey haired and balding. Sugar Daddies I wonder.
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