Descanso Gardens are ridiculously photogenic at any time, but on a slightly overcast spring day?

I write a lot of short stories which I then fail to get published anywhere. My idea of what makes a good story is apparently well out of step with what the reading world finds interesting.

My stories often start with an image or phrase that pops into my head. In some cases, this seed grows rapidly in the first writing session. In other cases, it sits fallow for a long time. Stories tend to accrete slowly over time – it often takes me several writing sessions to even know what I’m writing about. Sometimes they never resolve and a chunk stays unfinished. Other times, the characters or stories let me know where they want to go, and I finish them. It’s not a fast process. Most stories end up taking months to write at a few paragraphs a week.

When I’m in “the flow” when things are developing quickly, I’ll often awaken late at night with scenes or entire paragraphs bubbling up in my mind. If I rush, I can commit them to paper in the morning, but often I’ll let the specifics fade away. I suspect my semiconscious mind is busy world-building, and that will add depth to whatever specifics I end up writing later.

In the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, there was a group of four or five writers considered the Queens of Crime: Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngiao Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Josephine Tey. Christie gets most of the glory in the US due to the Hollywood adaptations of her novels, but recently I’ve been reading through Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg mysteries.

Anyone who has read Christie (even the modern, bowdlerized versions) knows they’re chock-a-block with racism, classism, and antisemitism, and, sadly, Sayers suffers from this as well. Unlike Christie, Sayers brings to bear her Oxford education, so her novels and short stories contain frequent allusions to and excerpts from writers ranging back into classic Greece and in a variety of languages. Like Christie, the plots are convoluted with any possible suspects and countless red herrings.

In her 1925 short story, “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will” (originally published Pearson’s Magazine, volume 60), Sayers includes a full crossword puzzle that Lord Peter Wimsey and his associates must solve to locate the referenced will. Normally, I let this kind of story just wash over me. I don’t try to solve the murder and I don’t try to analyze the clues. But in this case, I thought I’d try to solve the crossword.

Of course, British crosswords are different than the NY Times style with which I’m more familiar. Furthermore, the number of classical references quickly overwhelmed me. I wasn’t able to complete it. But maybe you will? I took the layout, clues, and solution and laid them out in a convenient PDF for your puzzling pleasure.

My cousin sent me a box of old photos that she had inherited from her mother. It turns out that my mother and her mother would send photo albums to one another throughout the late 1960s and into the early 1980s.

Many of these pictures are interesting to me, and I’d like to digitize them. The average online service wants between $0.65 and $1.25 to scan a print without doing touchup. I’ve used services to scan negatives in the past, but I have an old phot scanner and I have digital cameras that I could use to take photos of the prints.

The prints are degraded to various degrees and many are not really flat, so my first thought was to put them under glass and photograph them. I set up a rig to do that, but it was pretty finicky. Lighting to prevent reflections isn’t easy (I’m space-constrained by boxes of old junk in my office). The prints are many different sizes, and positioning each one took a lot longer than I wanted to spend on it. I don’t really need these in 12 or 24 megapixel detail, plus my macro lens is old and introduces some distortion.

So I decided to use my old Epson Perfection Photo 3170 from … ulp … 20 years ago. It’s USB-A and my current M1 MacBook only has USB-C ports, but I have plenty of USB-A to USB-C adapters for this kind of situation. I plugged the scanner into my M1 MacBook, but it was not recognized. I downloaded a new driver from Epson, but it wouldn’t install, giving me the helpful message “You can’t open the application “EPSON Scan Installer” because this application is not supported on this Mac.” Is that because it’s Intel code and I can’t run drivers in emulation? I have no clue.

I tried downloading VueScan, which is widely recommended for scanners where the driver is no longer provided, but it couldn’t see the scanner either. Mysterious. I’m beginning to think it’s something to do with the hardware itself. It used to work. Had the scanner died from sitting neglected?

I dug through one of those aforementioned space-constraining boxes of junk, and got out my Intel-based MacBook Pro from 2011. I powered it up, plugged the scanner in, and Image Capture immediately recognized it. So I’m scanning on the old machine.

Image Capture under old Mac OS is a little annoying, but I can scan 4 photos at a go into 32-bit TIFF files. I’m only scanning at 600dpi, so I’m getting roughly 6 megapixel scans of these photos. I considered scanning at a higher resolution, but the time and effort and storage involved didn’t seem to be worthwhile. I may regret this someday.

Anyway, here’s a birthday cake I decorated for my best friend Charlie back in March of 1978.

This guy was a great model. The hummer who’s claimed the front garden as his territory this year is not as happy in front of a camera.