While my wife went shopping…

While my wife unexpectedly had the afternoon off to go shopping with a 41-year old friend who looks like she’s still 31, hours after eating with friends, one who’s 24 and looks 24, with her father, 57 going on 58, I dug through the material my grandfather left behind, including a box of slides.

Thanks to a simple return policy by Wolverine Data, I received a working F2D14 scanner in the mail this afternoon.

Pulling a few sample slides, I scanned them and provide them here as samples that have sat for decades in a US Navy sea chest tucked in the back of an outdoor utility closet in south Florida:

My grandfather, the pirate

My grandfather, the pirate

My mother, me and my father

My mother, me and my father

Four generations of the Eldridge clan - Dad, Nana, me and Great-Granddad

Four generations of the Eldridge clan – Dad, his mother, me and Great-Granddad

My grandmother at a hotel swimming pool, elegantly dressed as usual

My grandmother at a hotel swimming pool, elegantly dressed as usual

An artistic photo by my grandfather

An artistic photo by my grandfather

Monticello, when women and girls wore skirts, sweaters and pretty smiles.

Monticello, when women and girls wore skirts, sweaters and pretty smiles.

Quotes for the day

Leo Cawley, Vietnam veteran:

There is almost no human activity that is as intensely social as modern warfare… When a military unit loses its internal cohesion and starts to fight as individuals there is such a radical and unfavourable change in the casualty ratio that it is almost always decisive… Every general staff in the world since 1914 has known that the bravery of individual soldiers in modern war is about as essential as whether they are handsome.

J.G. Ballard:

…the slaughter in Star Wars, quite apart from the destruction of an entire populated planet, is unrelieved for two hours, and at times stacks the corpses halfway up the screen.  Losing track of the huge bodycount, I thought at first that the film might be some weird, unintentional parable of the US involvement in Vietnam, with the plucky hero from the backward planet and his scratch force of reject robots and gook-like extraterrestrials fighting bravely against the evil and all-destructive super-technology of the Galactic Empire.  Whatever the truth, it’s strange that the film gets a U certificate — two hours of Star Wars must be one of the most efficient means of weaning your pre-teen child from any fear of, or sensitivity towards, the death of others.