Oh hai. I'm still alive. This three week chemo schedule gives my body some much-needed extra time to recover, but it hits me harder. My care team assures me that what I'm experiencing is within the bell curve of normal, if normal is even a proper term.
Had a check-in with my PCP yesterday, and there was nothing unexpected going on there, so that's all good.
Since I'm pretty well exhausted all the time I've been looking for something to do that keeps the brain active and gets a little movement in. I'm back at cataloging all of my negatives. "But Julie," I can hear you say, "that's rather sedentary work!" Not really, because I have to stand up to shoot a sleeve of negatives, stand up again for a bit that involves using the scanner, and then get up and walk across the room to get the printed contact sheet. Rinse and repeat. Many times. I did about 30 this afternoon.
I'll spare you the fiddly details (you're welcome!), but briefly, I'm using a free app called Kodak Mobile Film Scanner to shoot a page of negatives sandwiched between a light pad and a piece of glass. I do some quick and dirty correction in Affinity Photo to create a digital contact sheet that I then print. That goes into a sheet protector and it and the negative sheet go into a binder on facing pages so I can see the negatives and positives together.
Of course I've built my own web-based application that runs on my local web server to catalog all this. I didn't bust my ass learning SQL for nothing! I end up with a page like I have attached. The color isn't perfect and the resolution on the image is low, but all I want to do is see what I have and be able to search through everything.
Later on I'll work on a good method of scanning single negatives at high resolution. Like everything else, it'll be low-budget. A $500 negative scanner is definitely out, particularly since I have an insurance deductible to meet. Honestly, one of those would probably be overkill anyway. See the next paragraph.
The ultimate goal here is to consolidate the almost literal truckload of prints and negatives cluttering up the place into something manageable. Most of those prints aren't worth keeping, but if I decide down the road I want something then I should be able to find the negative and scan it. (To be clear, these are mostly snapshots that were developed at the drug store.)
Some of you may wonder what a contact sheet is. Back in the darkroom era, we would do just what I'm doing except with photographic paper and chemicals. It's called a contact sheet because the negatives are laying on the paper and are not enlarged.
And here's a picture of one record in my web application. Again, the images aren't perfect and they don't need to be. I just have to see what I've got.