Journal of a Sabbatical

February 22, 2000

journaler's progress

Today's Reading: Winter: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O Blake

Pedro Martinez is in camp. All is right with the world.

Meanwhile, it seems to be taking me longer to put up the journal of my trip than the actual trip itself took. I worked all afternoon on getting as far as the account of the Force 10 (or 12 or 13.5) storm on January 31. I made progress on a lot of the later entries too, and went through all but one of the floppies of photos I took with the Mavica. Alas, the reason it's all but one is that I can't seem to find one of the floppies. It's got to be around here someplace. The problem is all loose unlabeled beige Sony diskettes look alike. I put three blank diskettes in a row into the drive during my search. Why blank diskettes are floating free on my desk is another question. I'm usually slightly more organized than that.

Going through the pictures has been a lot of fun. It makes the memories more vivid. It's hard to edit them down to a manageable number for the journal entries when so many of them are really good shots. And that's not even counting the pictures on film - analog pictures? - that I took with my newly rebuilt Pentax. The Pentax pictures came out fine. I did, of course, shoot two test rolls when I got it back from the repair place but I still had a little tinge of anxiety about it.

The other thing I was doing this afternoon was trying to figure out how to get decent prints of the Mavica pictures out of my Epson Stylus 740. I experimented with various sizes and with various papers and got some OK prints but nothing approaching what I'd consider "photo quality". Part of that is the low resolution of the Mavica camera and part of it is the printer. I've seen prints of my cat pictures printed on other people's printers and they look better than mine. Also other Mavica cultists claim to have gotten good prints. Must research this printer thing.

Today's mail brought two good things: the copy of Antarctic Oasis that I ordered for Nancy from amazon.com, and the official Greg Lasley bird list for the trip from VENT. I still want to make my own list because I didn't see every bird that anyone reported and I want to add more detail about date and place than Greg put in the official list. Bird Brain 5.0 is on its way to me through the mail also but did not arrive today, so doing the list my way will have to wait a little longer. I did have great fun reading over the official list and remembering each bird.

As for the Tim & Pauline Carr book, Antarctic Oasis, I had decided against buying it in South Georgia and lugging it around with me for the rest of the trip even though I could have had Tim & Pauline sign it (I haven't written that entry yet - will backtrack and provide a link here when I do I guess). It's a big heavy coffee table book, which probably would have put my luggage over LAN Chile's weight limit, not to mention strained my shoulder. Besides that, I didn't have a plastic ZipLoc bag the right size for it and ever since that bizarre rain storm in Quito turned every book in my luggage into a lump of papier maché I'm very careful about waterproofing any book that goes into my checked baggage. I'm probably paranoid since most airports don't pile luggage on the runway in the open during flash floods anyway and flash floods in airports aren't that common,although I have experienced them in both Quito and Birmingham, Alabama. The Birmingham thing was a business trip in my previous life and the flood was much scarier than the one in Quito but didn't wreck anything except my suit... Where was I? Oh, yeah, the book I bought for Nancy. It's about South Georgia. Of all the possible souvenirs I could have picked up for Nancy, the book was the thing that most conveyed the beauty of South Georgia. For myself I picked up a green T-shirt with an albatross on it, which says South Georgia Museum. I think when I wear it people will associate it with the Peach Tree State despite the albatross, but I'll know where I got it.