Sunday, March 6, 2011

Time flies past.



I'm keeping fit

Hard to believe I have not had the time to update the Blog since December but Christmas followed by New Year was followed by a new project that took up more time than expected.

Having finished a genealogy trek through our family surname back as far as 1752 then writing it up and finally finishing just before summer 2010 I decide to do something about the myriad of family photographs, the earliest being approximately 1898, that I inherited from my Father. Age spares no one not even photographs so many were torn, had damp spots or other damage making them not very atractive to say the least.


Lot of damage like this.
A bit of TLC was required,  well a very large bit of TLC was required to be honest so I decide to re-photograph all the old photos with my Digital camera dump them on to the computer and use the magic of imaging software to try and repair damage. I updated Paint Shop Pro and got stuck in.
Now just in case you fancy doing this trust me when I say it has taken two and a half months to get a decent result but having printed out some of the really badly damaged photos onto photo paper after repair, I am more than pleased with the results as you would think the photos had been taken recently.

So now I have these nice photos, but it was going to be expensive to print them out to give my relations copies so once again I spent some money and updated a program I bought about 10 years ago to make a Digital Album in chronological order and am well pleased with the result once again. Now it is just a case of copying to disks with the added bonus that I was able to put the family history into the album as well, killing two birds with one stone.

Unlike the terrible December 2009 to the end of March 2010 when we had unprecedented continuous heavy rain the same period but 2010 to 2011 has in general been back to the Portugal we knew, plenty sunshine with the odd very heavy showers and even Christmas day when we had friends over it was sunny.

I write this while sitting in the Campervan in Tavira where we have
joined Steph and John from the UK with their motorhome on a Portuguese Police campsite, having had a nice easy drive from one side of Portugal to the other and we plan to stay for a couple of days.

If anybody is planning to visit Portugal be aware that as from the 15th of April, 2011 all motorways in the country become Toll roads and though I have not got conformation understand at this time you will have to purchase a Disk which can be read electronically once on the motorway. Up to now the idea is you get the Disk from a Post Office (Correos) for  27 Euros then top it up immediately with 50 Euros so your holiday will start with a 77 Euro tax. At the end of your holiday you will be able to hand in the Disk and get your 27 Euros back and if you dont use all the 50 Euros ? nobody seems to be able to tell us. I suspect this is going to hit Portugal hard tourism wise especially as the non motorway roads are not exactly of the best quality and caravanners and motorhome users will probably head for Spain once again. Communication with the public has a long way to go in Portugal especially when enquiries are not even answered.


Lighthouse at Cabo do Sadoa.

Having said all of the above
yesterday Monday 28th February
Reason for the Lighthouse.

saw us off up the west coast with Greg and Jill another couple of friends to visit some of  the beautiful beaches that border the Atlantic, it was nice to be a passenger instead of the driver.




          Kit's garden is going from strength to strength with potted plants all in a row.


The Brute







Unfortunately for me our next door neighbour offered Kit a palm tree, just a small one, also in a pot. The B****y thing is about 7ft tall and unlike the smaller one she already has this vicious brute has nasty very sharp pointed leaves with which it attacks the unsuspecting mover of various objects on royal command, why SHE cannot stick with things like Crocuses or Daffodils I dont know.

The importance of having more than one backup of work on the computer was driven home a week or two ago when one of my external hard drive's died taking everything with it including backups of other drives. Fortunately I normally use three external drives so nothing was lost but I did have to buy a new one which I got £20.00 off because somebody had priced it wrong but the owner of the shop told the assistant to sell me it at the shown price.

April will see some of our family visiting us for a week's holiday and not to soon after we will hit the trail heading to the UK for our holiday using the campervan. We are a bit early this year but we have a very special birthday party to go to in Scotland which we are looking forward to.

With a bit of luck you may be able to see the following Album which was not hard to put together but getting it up onto the internet was torturous to say the least, if I have it correct you should go straight to it, but dont hold your breath
CLICK here  ...   http://www.flipviewer.com/fven/?opf=http://www.jacknkit.co.uk/DayOut.opf

Once the Album opens just click on the page edge to turn the pages.

Cheers, Jack n Kit.