After church I will walk to Amherst College and spend some time in the Frost Library while Katie spends time as a volunteer at the church and Savanna and Brendon go to the movies. I'll rejoin them at 3p.m. Then I guess we will come home.
One of my goals at the Frost Library will be to find a book my father refers to as one he enjoyed very much reading. He refers to it in a letter to his friend, George Drew, written in 1934 from Grays Lake, IL. The book is Caroline Miller, Lamb In His Bosom. It had been published a year to two earlier at that time, and it had won the author the Pulitzer Prize. It is about life in South Georgia just before the Civil War. Dad says he found its description of everyday life very familiar to him and his experience growing up in rural Georgia. The Amherst College Library catalogue online says it has a copy, so I'm hopeful that I will find it (you never know). I would like to make a photocopy, but my iPod has developed problems with the charge cord, so is not working. There may be options.
Later;
I found the book! The good news is that the Library Cafè has a charging station where there is a charge cord that fits my iPod. The bad news is that my iPod won't charge! So the problem may be with the iPod, not the cord. I know it needs a new battery but it has worked for some time if it is always plugged in. But that is no longer the case. It is a very old iPod - maybe as much as 15 years old or even more. So I guess I can't be too surprised. But I intended to use it to photograph pages of the book. Now I'll have to see if there is a scanner somewhere here.
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| Got it! |
Later still:
There was a scanner at the library, but unlike other scanners I've used, which save to a thumb drive, this one saved to an email address. It was free, and I entered my email address and got a .pdf file of what I scanned. I could do an assembled job which allowed me to scan, e.g., 40 pages (= 80 book pages), and send it as a unit to my email. I did that in two batches and scanned 12 chapters, or about 170 pages in all - maybe half the book. So that wasn't too bad - better than I feared when I discovered the iPod was not working.
Now I'm back at Katie and Savanna's and just had a snack.
And yet later on Sunday...
We had supper on a card table in the TV room while we watched the Patriots beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 17-10 I think it was. It was sort of a strange game; e.g., Tom Brady couldn't connect on his passing and the Patriots were forced to kick three field-goals in the first half after the Eagles got ahead by 10 points. Savanna is trying out YouTubeTV which is a streamed TV service that has quite a bit on it and is only $45 a month. Not bad. She went to a meeting yesterday about new TV options in Shutesbury and came back quite informed. Meanwhile, I have been working on the Spelling Bee puzzle, and I think I have achieved "genius" status.
Oh- yesterday evening, K,S, B and I played "O Hell" - the bidding card game where you start out with a 10-card hand, go down to a one-card hand and back up to 10. It's actually a fun game. A nice mix of skill and luck.
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| My three-card hand. I think Clubs were trump, which meant no trump cards in my hand. I bid 0. If you make your bid (i.e., in this case take no tricks) you get ten points. I got 10 points. If I had inadvertently taken one trick with the Queen of spades (it can happen), I would have gotten only 1 point for this round. Winning your bid earns 10 points plus number of tricks taken. Katie won handily; I came in last, but just three points behind Brendon. |
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| The Frost Library Cafè area |
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| This was an archival photo hanging by the elevator in the Library showing Amherst College seniors in 1910 playing leapfrog on commencement day! |
My iPod seems to be working fine now! If it had been working earlier the way it is now, I could have used it to photograph the book. Hmmm. What is that all about? I could go back tomorrow and finish the job. But actually, scanning it produces much better quality, and is only a bit slower. Main advantage in using the iPod? I can sit down while doing it. Scanning entails standing. But if I scan in 10-15 minute segments, it's ok. But why was it totally useless this afternoon and is ok tonight - with my charge cord to boot ?! I don't get it.
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