My goodness, the calendar pages have turned since last I wrote a blog post….energy levels seemed to dip low during the depths of winter especially in our frigid, cloudy climate. February felt as if it was twice as long as usual with our very wintery weather. We didn’t receive so much snow this year but the daytime highs remained record breaking low in the single digits and made it difficult to even want to go outside for a short walk. Comfort food was the order of the day and that must be faced now that spring will reveal what was hidden under down jackets. Knitting and crocheting seemed more satisfying and relaxing than photo editing. I did manage to complete some of those non-creative photo activities such as organizing and scanning vintage photos, and deleting the poor images in the past year’s photos. The change in light levels is very noticeable now and seems to have refueled the desire to create so it’s time to get back in the blogging habit. And as the saying goes…”Done is better than perfect.” It’s so easy to get in the trap of not posting until one gets the “perfect” photo or the non-perfect photo perfected.
Franklin was checking out the activity at the bird feeders outside the window until I placed this vintage portable typewriter on the table, at which point he gave it a very thorough sniffing. I imagine it has a few odors since it is circa 1937. It is a treasure that came home with me after antique mall browsing. Perfect condition with a lovely case and the original instruction booklet for only $45. It will be fun to use in my paper scrapbooking projects.
I remember taking typing class during the summer in a room full of huge manual typewriters and practicing the old exercise “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or “Now is the time for every good man to come to the aid of his country”, doing timed tests, and memorizing all the different formats for a business letter, friendly letter, etc. The stiff hard touch required of the old manual machines was very satisfying and it was quite a different experience to use one of the few electric typewriters in the classroom. How excited we were when a typewriter was purchased for our home so that we didn’t have to type up papers at school.
Correction film, ribbons with correction capability, and liquid white-out were some of the innovations that were so welcomed in the years before computers and word processing programs. Young people these days have little idea of the skills needed to produce a perfectly presented term paper. I love typewriters but I would never want to give up the luxury of being able to choose from any one of a zillion fonts and use it in any size I might wish.
