I was doing something else at the farm. I find myself doing that a lot. I start on one thing and get caught up in something else and never arrive where I thought I was going to be. The rain had come in sheets dense enough to knock out first the satellite Internet connection and then the television, not that I watch it during the day, though I made an exception that morning since there were rumblings that the Nuclear Deal with Iran was finally going to pop out, and sure enough, it did.

There is plenty of commentary flying around on it, so I will let it go. The Administration seems to be in an awful big hurry to get things done- all sorts of things. It’s like they think they won’t be around much longer. I have been involved in nuclear negotiations before and understand how complex they are, and how trust is so vital to their successful implementation. In my case, it was talks with the North Koreans.

That didn’t work out so well, and I can’t imagine this one is going to be any better. At least we know the timeline by which we ought to be out of the blast zone.

Which brings be back to the notebooks from Great Grandfather’s tour of
Europe. His trip through the prosperous capitals of colonial empires was a little more than eleven years before the strange inexorable slide into the abyss of WW I. It would have been incomprehensible that the leaders of his progressive world would deliberately create the plans to commit collective suicide.

It couldn’t happen again, could it? After all we learned in the century since?

Anyway, what with the rain, I decided to do some organizing in the farmhouse. Several stacks of data discs were cluttering the console where the flatscreen television sits, and I decided to arrange them in some sort of order. They were the product of data migration over the years. Remember all the formats? The big old floppy disks with the magnetic media inside a plastic folder? The first book I wrote on a computer was on several of those. I migrated them to the smaller hard-plastic disks, back when computers had slots for them, and then I converted those to ZipDisks that could hold a lot more, and then those went away and I had to burn the data to the CDs.

I am sure they are going away as well, and there are three or four external hard-drives of increasing size that now contain the guts of all the computers I have owned. It is quite remarkable, and they tell me all that is migrating to the Cloud, whatever that is. I suppose I should just toss it all- no one will have an operating system that will open the data contained on them by the time I am gone, and who care

I thought I could find a place to stow the CDs in the console itself, and when I gingerly eased my aching knees to the Oriental carpet and opened the door, I saw them: the two notebooks and the scrapbook that Great Grandfather had assembled from the photographs taken on the trip. Eureka!

When I transcribed the contents of the notebooks years ago, I scanned the contents of the scrapbook as well. The version of MicroSoft Word I had then did not embed the pictures as well as it does now, and the pictures were never integrated with the text. It is too hard to get back on my feet these days, and I decided to stay down on the rug and take a look at the pictures.

Great grandfather neatly appended the date he assembled the pictures into a coherent narrative: June 5, 1911. He had been home eight years before he got around to it. I got lost, and by the time the rain finally stopped, I was transported to a sepia time in a lost world.

I need to figure out what about-to-be obsolete format I need to save the pictures to.

Or maybe just post them to the cloud and forget about it.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twiter: @jayare303