auld lang syne

I think I've mentioned before that Pd's father and stepmother live on a farm near Collingwood. They've retired to a big, modern house there with all of the latest amenities (including satellite television, pool table, wine cellar and a deck that is bigger than our last apartment), but when Pd was growing up, the accommodations were definitely more rustic: a log cabin with extensions for the kitchen and bathroom. (Their water, until a few years ago, still came from a well ... which was interesting when they were in the midst of a teardown and the well pump broke.)

Anyway, for the past year or two, Pd's father has been slowly stripping the old farmhouse back to its log cabin roots with a view of eventually turning it into a studio. Consequently, he's been finding a lot of long-buried things from the deep recesses of the house. Last summer, they unearthed a couple of big bins of Lego and Transformers; after a bath in some soapy water, the cache entertained the grandsons for days.

And this weekend, Pd's father surprised us with a giant bin of old family photographs that he invited us to root through for things to take home. It wasn't just photographs from Pd's childhood — there was older stuff in there, too, even a few from his father's childhood in France.


It was a mess, though; just piles of photographs, 35mm negatives, some slides, nothing labelled and everything just sort of in stacks. We thought it was a shame to tear it all apart and put it away, and it was impossible to tell what were in the negatives or slides — so we decided to turn this into a bigger project. We've ordered a really nice Epson scanner (not quite professional grade, but close), capable of scanning slides and negatives as well as photographs, and we're going to install it at the farm and catalogue and sort the entire box.

It's a big project, and it's going to take months, possibly years. But I am really excited about it.