Red sky in Roanoke

This morning I managed to get up before the sunrise. It turned out to be a wise decision. Shortly before sunrise I was treated to a great natural light show. It was a nice time to be watching the sky and drinking coffee. I spent most of the morning working on a Christmas present for some cousins. I have been scanning pictures they collected when they cleaned out my Aunt Molly's home. Both my Mother and Aunt Molly were born in the early part of last century. This morning I was working on slides using my new Epson Perfection V500 scanner. I ended up being very impressed the Epson software and hardware. I am planning on delivering a DVD to each of my five cousins sometime between Christmas and New Years. They are all around seventy years old or about ten years older than me. The DVD may never be a final product since I suspect we will keep finding photos. The initial DVD will have over 300 old photos and a movie of my Mother and my Aunt Molly that I did several years ago. The biggest challenge that I have left is labeling some of the people in the older photos. I already have a lot of hours into the project, and as I have put it together I am amazed at what technology will let me do with all these images. However it has occurred to me that few people have any idea how much work goes into even a small project like this. Unless you done one of these, it is hard to have appreciation for all the hours of fiddling with photos. Just getting everything scanned has taken over eight hours of sitting in front of the computer. Tweaking, cropping, and working on some photos has added another couple of hours. It took about half an hour to coerce my specialized HP printer to print the labels on DVDs. Before that there was the hour trip to Morehead City to get printable DVDs. That printer is in our coastal home and my scanner is in Roanoke. Also I put the photos up on Picasa Web Albums which took some additional time. On top of all that I spent a couple of days fighting with a new HP Scanner which I returned before I ended up with the Epson scanner which has been a charm to use. All together it has been a much more time consuming project than I thought it would be. The good news is that I just put together a DVD of the Emerald Isle Christmas Parade so I am up to speed on the changes in iDVD which makes all of this possible. Hopefully some day, another generation will enjoy looking back at all these photos.