Re: Good timing...
So, I spent this past weekend on a whirlwind roadtrip with my mom and two of my brothers, going to visit another of my brothers. I know for some people, this would hardly be the stuff of a 'Good Stuff' post, but I get along pretty well with my family, so it was good.
But the real good part is this--as we were on our way back home, driving through the barrens of mid-Nevada, Mom started asking if any of us had a carousel slide projector. We've been working, in fits and starts, on trying to get some family history stuff done, and there's a HUGE chunk of it that's missing, because for decades, Dad shot pictures almost exclusively on slides (because they were easier to share with a group of people than prints were, I assume...and they take up less space to store...) She thought most of them had vanished somewhere along the line, but she found a box full of them (and I mean FULL...), and now she's interested in trying to get them organized and scanned into a digital format. Problem is, most of them aren't labelled...and while she has a slide viewer, and even a projector that will take slides one at a time, she wanted a faster way to review them and select the ones that actually mean something and should be scanned.
None of us have one, however...I only ever did stuff with slides during about four or five years of my life, I'm not sure my older brothers EVER did much with slides (I'm not even sure how much they actually bother taking pictures...) So, Mom was a little disappointed and had started to resign herself to doing the project the hard way...
Well, earlier today, I was in a thrift store, shopping for props for one of the shows we're producing at work this summer...and there it was. A carousel slide projector. And I thought, "Hey, if this doesn't cost too much, Mom would probably love it..." So I found the price tag--$5. And then I thought, "If the light actually works, I should get this..."
And it did. So I did. And dropped it off at Mom's place, where we filled it up with slides and skimmed through them pretty quickly (most of them were taken before I was even born...)
I also got costume pieces for my friend's 80's-themed event this weekend (enough to make about four or five different outfits, I think...since she performs in an 80's band every few weeks, I'm pretty sure I'll find occasions to wear the ones I don't wear this weekend), AND I got several of the prop items I was looking for in the first place. Good time to make a sweep through the area thrift stores!