BEFORE THE FILM FADES INTO OBLIVION.....

The pictures aren't worth having restored, but since the two sets made me laugh so much, I figured if I got them on the computer -- and on Hot Coffee and Cool Jazz -- at least they would have a fighting chance to be seen in the future.

The upper picture is on a birdwatching jaunt one morning -- I'd guess maybe about 1987 -- in which my cousin Shirlee, a long-time birder, is showing Jerry and me how to do it. I can't remember for sure but I must have brought along my tripod, since the three of us are in both pictures and at the hour we arrived at the park, there were not yet any other people around. And just a word of explanation, the picture was taken during my "grey hair" phase.

You won't see any birds in the photos, but you will definitely see us looking directly for one!

The next picture has a similarity.


Two of our cats, Dolly on the left and Spot on the right, always ate on the dryer. We had a dog who would scarf up any cat food we put within her reach, so it was necessary to get the kitty food up off the floor. When I snapped the first photo I had no idea the cats were going to turn around and look where the flash came from, but my reaction time was so good at that early stage in my life that I managed to pull off a second photo just at the right time. What you don't see in these photos, but could when the slide was projected onto a screen, is that both cats were caught with their little pink tongues hanging out.

For about a 15 year period, I shot only slide film. That period of time included scenes from a tour of Egypt and Israel in 1980 and a month-long visit to England in 1985. I had two SLR cameras and Jerry had one. You can imagine that by the time 1990 came, we had at least one closet-full of slides. I did make a few prints to put in scrapbooks of our trips, but by and large the slides sat unlooked at in their little carousels for all that time.

One of my projects after I retired was to go through all the slides and ruthlessly throw out all scenic pictures, blurred pictures, etc. We kept funny, cute and/or charming family photos so that we would have one carousel's worth to show at family parties. We kept some pictures that when seen by our grandchildren caused them to dramatically fall to the floor in laughter. I think one was of their own father naked as a jaybird lying on a baby blanket in the back yard. This little slide show has been worth all the hours and hours of work it took me to cull out the slides we thought were important to keep.

Because these colored films are not going to hold up like the black and white ones of earlier generations, I have made some b/w copies of some of them, and then as noted above have posted them online in various places, hoping that they will survive for a while yet.

At any rate, the photos above have always been special to me, because you have to admit, they ARE funny!