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Monday, December 10, 2001

After email and 'Net checks this morning, it was down to the garage for some woodworking. We are tiling four window sills about the house; a check disclosed that the tiles are oversized by 10 mm. Now I could get the tile place to trim them, but that costs $2 per tile (and there are lots) -- so I decided to prepare a 10mm wood strip for each window and glue it on to the board edge. Fortunately I have a saw bench to hand, and also a good Bosch electric plane complete with a thicknesser attachment, so a half-hour's work saw the strips all ready to apply. As well as this, I prepared and sanded the strip to go along Joanna's oven top -- this needed a piece cut out at the bottom to accommodate the top of the oven door.

After lunch, we drove over to Lisa Cresc, fitted the strip, and returned home. My next job was to complete the first lot of tiling in the front toilet by applying the grout, cleaning up, and tidying the grout up after it had set. A good day's work (for me, that is <g>) More genealogy entry after tea; I've just about completed the entries now, and can think about a big print-out of info to send around.

Also arrived today by courier was an Olympus camera body I'd ordered from Christchurch. It's an OM4; I already have my original OM2 I bought in Singapore in 1976, and an OM2SP I acquired several years later. The OM4 has some sophisticated, but manually controlled exposure determinations. With the three bodies, I'll be able to go out with my two young lady photo students (Rebeccah and her friend Gemma) and we can all share the same pool of lenses. I am aiming to use some of the macro lenses I have to do some close-up and nature shots, while the girls do an assignment. Their first lesson is tomorrow morning.

Tuesday, December 11, 2001

A busy day: I had two young ladies hanging on my every word from 10.30 am to 4 pm. Rebeccah and her friend Gemma had their first lesson in photography. I took them through the properties of light, colours, optics, etc in the morning; fairly superficially, but detailed enough so that they knew what I was talking about. After lunch, I produced my three Olympus cameras, showed them how to hold a camera properly and release the shutter without jerking. Then I turned them loose outside to practice focussing, shooting, winding, changing from landscape to portrait etc -- all with no film in the camera. They did this solidly for about an hour, which told me that they were really absorbed in what they were doing. I will give them a further lesson on Thursday afternoon.

That took care of most of the day; I was talked out, so relaxed with a book for a while until teatime. I watched a lot of TV tonight: an English archaeological series; a US cop show; and an indigenous comedy series starring one of our better Maori acting groups, which was about the interaction between a Maori Chief and family, and a European immigrant family. The first series was rather slapstick, but this new series is 100% better and scripts have greatly improved also. The chief is called "Te Tutu" -- in Maori, tutu is to fiddle with, or muck about with; so this rather sets the tone of the show. Lots of subtle local puns and sly digs, but one has to know a little Maori and Maori custom to really appreciate this. I sat and did a thorough job of cleaning the Olympus bodies while I watched TV; the two older ones haven't had film through them for about 10 years or so.

Wednesday, December 12, 2001

The first job today was to glue and tack the strips of wood (previously prepared) along the window sill edges, and apply a coat of varnish to some, and primer to the bathroom sill. We went into town after lunch; visited the library to change books, then to Don's office to install the new Zip drive. A no-brainer, really: whip the case top off, remove screws from drive cradle (it was in a 5 1/4" slot), change drives, refit cradle, plug in cables, refit case top. all done in 10 minutes. Instant Zip transplant.

We also picked up more tiles (changed the bathroom ones to white), more glue and grout, and ordered more fawn tiles for the window which will eventually be installed in the lounge (next year). I did some work on my asthma web site, some more work on to one for Don, then knocked off at 8.30 pm to watch the last episode of 'Hornblower' -- which for some reason known only to TV programmers, we have been waiting for six months for.

Thursday, December 13, 2001

Joanna came in this morning with a document for me to help her with; it's an annual appraisal for Aorangi School that has to be done every year [she's Chair of the Board of Trustees; every school in NZ has one of these]. I pulled up her folder on my data drive -- only to find that somehow I had neglected to save it last year. I remember preparing it and printing it out, but... Fortunately she had the final version of last year's one that the school had done from my draft; so I scanned each page and converted it to a text file with Textbridge. For some reason, the stupid program wouldn't append each fresh page after I had processed it -- so I was reduced to saving each page separately, and combining them back together again in MSWord. I was then able to do all this year's text update for her, then save and print.

After lunch, I tackled the motel website job; set up tables to remove the frames and got the home page laid out as before. I broke from that about 3.30 pm to advance the tiling job one step further: more varnish on the edges. However, I found that the old wood primer I'd used in the bathroom had 'gone off' and was still tacky. The best solution seemed to be removing it with turps, then swapping to acrylic-based primer -- which of course I had run out of. So I had to climb into the car and drive to a local paint emporium to pick up the primer and a fresh tin of white glossy top-coat. That meant that the little strip of wood had just cost me $NZ24; I think the rest of the paintwork will get a fresh coat, too.

Tonight after tea, I've scanned a dozen photos for the web site and saved a second version of each at web resolution. It's surprising how, what appears to be a clean print, will show up in the scan with a whole lot of scratches and general crud. It's probably a waste of time to titivate them up before hacking them down for the web, but I know from experience that quite often one of my scans is suddenly needed for a newspaper ad or some such. It's just as easy to scan at 600 ppi, clean the pic up, and save it for future need -- which experience has taught me can arrive in a blind panic.

Friday, December 14, 2001

I did my website stats this morning, and was surprised to read that it's had 9338 hits already this month, and one day went over the 1000. That's from 920 unique IP addresses; quite amazing. I'm getting a lot of Google search traffic -- the Google spider goes through the site once a week; this generates lots of hits from search requests because of the rather eclectic array of topics I mention. I also get the occasional email regarding some subject I discussed in a Kronikle long past.

Into town in the late morning, and met Joanna and Rebeccah for lunch. Afterwards, I picked up three sets of batteries for the Olympus [Olympii??] OM cameras, so they're ready to roll now. Apart from a good clean of the optics; a number of the lenses haven't seen light for a long time -- probably 10 to 12 years. Joan caught up with some shopping, mainly size exchanges, then we headed back home.

I started cutting tiles for the kitchen sill; the window catches required that I cut an arc out of the back edge, so that the catch could properly engage. Unfortunately, the carbide blade in the jigsaw had suffered badly from the super-hard tiles I had tried to cut for Joanna, so I had to drive down to my hardware outlet to get another. This went through the tile like cutting wood, and made short work of the job. I also had to cut off two tile strips, one for each end of the sill. The glue went on, and the tiles are in place ready for grouting tomorrow.

Saturday, December 15, 2001

I was busy making my breakfast this morning, and realised that the tile on the kitchen sill I was looking at, was sticking up about 15mm above its neighbours. Arggggh... I had applied adhesive to the varnished sill, which had lifted off very neatly. Later, a knife underneath the tiles lifted them straight off, and I removed the remaining varnish with stripper. I let the sill dry, and finally re-glued the tiles down into place in mid-afternoon.

Joan went off with Joanna to do a supermarket shop; Rebeccah had stayed the night, as she had been across the road baby-sitting until midnight. I started doing a vacuum clean upstairs, as we will be having Kay and Teddy from England staying with us off and on until next month. I had been hoping to mow the lush growth on the lawn, but again the weather defeated me with intermittent showers all day. I managed to get some more of my stuff properly put away in the office; so much was just jammed onto shelves that it needed a good sort out.

Kay and Teddy arrived by rental car about 9 pm; we all had a soup feed and chattered for a while before calling it a night.

Sunday, December 16, 2001

We all rose leisurely this morning; I was up first, and Kay and Teddy slept well into the morning doing a catch-up on jet-lag and a busy 'tourist' week in Sydney. Once more there were several showers during the day which prevented me from mowing the lawns.

I spent most of the day pulling out all my Olympus OM lenses, flash guns and accessories; cleaning them and cycling the flashguns to get them functioning. Again, these flashes hadn't been fired for years, and it took a little patience to get the capacitors re-formed and accepting a charge-up. Alas, one of my oldest flashguns, an Olympus Quick Auto 310 failed to revive and is not useable. However a 300 model (which is not TTL-capable) is OK, and also a small T20 gun. That will be sufficient for the girls to use for anything they are likely to encounter at this stage. I have another flash, a T32 model which failed to show anywhere; after some thought I remember lending it to son-in-law Jeremy probably five years ago. I'll be asking for it back...

I was also pleased to find a couple of working hand-held exposure meters to use to teach the girls about exposing film. Lots of other goodies turned up: an original Olympus XA 'clamshell' 35mm, and a lovely Pentax 110 reflex with three lenses, a flashgun and a winder. I took these to the UK in the '80s, and shot slides in the XA and prints in the Pentax.