Ugh, back to winter again. Friday was 25 deg, nice Spring weather, but yesterday, Saturday, was wet, grey and cloudy and today’s not much better. The blanket went back on top of the doona last night, whereas Friday night I started out lying uncovered. Not too bad today, sun’s out now but it’s been raining and the forecast is for a wet week right through to next weekend. Huh.

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Re the photo above of the barque Endeavour, did you read during the week that the replica ship Duyfken has left Fremantle for Sydney permanently?

Yes, it’s gone from Fremantle and WA. Although it was built here and is identified with WA, it was costing about $450,000 a year in maintenance and the state government said it wouldn’t support it any more. No sponsors could be found here, so it’s gone. What a pity. They used to do twilight dinner cruises on the river and we hoped to go on one when we could manage it. Too late, the chance is gone.

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As you probably know, I have many thousands of images stored up, mostly mine but many from the web. How to view them and more importantly, how to find them?

For years I’ve been using a program called ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate and I’ve just upgraded to the latest 2021 version (a bit premature of them).

Above is the main view called Manage, with the folder and drives list on the left. Clicking on a folder shows its contents.

This is a new mode called Photos, which allows a quick overview of all the images grouped by Year (as shown above),

You can change between Year, Month and Day just by rolling the mouse wheel, so it’s very quick and easy. The point is that it allows me to quickly find a picture, as the eye can pick an image out from the mass much more easily than trying to remember which folder it’s in.

Once I’ve found the image, I change to Edit mode:

This is where I adjust colour, saturation, vibrance, cropping, perspective correction, sharpness, noise, spotting and so on.

I won’t bore you with every detail, it’s just that I’m quite impressed with this software and the new(ish) Photos display of hundreds of images at a glance has me quite excited.

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I’m well into Volume 3 of the Croft History, writing about Cunderdin at the moment.

There’s going to be much more text and narrative in this volume as I can remember so much more. In fact, I find the words just flow as I write. The memories come back and the more I think about them, the more detail I remember. I’m really enjoying this. Being able to colourise all these black and white images has really got me going. I have so much to write!

One memory about Cunderdin which is not worth putting in the book: we went to see a movie (a flick, as it was in those days, we never said “movie”) called The Back of Beyond.

It included scenes of desert, drought and desolation. In particular, it showed a lost group of children trying to find their settlement. This affected me greatly and to this day, I’m a bit nervous of wide open spaces. I have a feeling of discomfort being out miles from anywhere and I think it’s a hangover from this film. I’ve never watched it since then but I see it’s available so maybe I should exorcise my ghosts.

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Another movie that scared the pants off me was When Worlds Collide. Uncle Max took me to see it in Bruce Rock in about 1953 I think, (it’s a 1951 production so maybe it was 1952 when I was five?) and I had bad dreams about it for months afterwards. It’s out on DVD and I think I might even have it – I think I started to watch it but it was so corny I stopped.

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When this pandemic started back in March I did what most people were doing, I stocked up on “pandemic food”. Not a huge amount – I didn’t buy boxes and cartons, but I did buy four green bags full of microwave rice, pasta, tins of soup and beans, packets of Indian vegetarian food, daal etc and many small tins of tuna, salmon and chicken and so on. These bags have sat on the floor under a table for six months now. I hauled a couple out yesterday and crikey! I don’t need to buy food for another six months. In fact I’ve got more than I need or can store. I think it would be best if I take it to the Food Bank box outside Coles.

I’m coming to the end of my hoarded supply of toilet paper too. How about you?