(Days of work remaining before holiday time off: 12)
After the last entry here, I feel the need to clarify a bit.
I am not heartless -- there are many cats Daisy has wanted over the years that would not have been practical or ideal for many reasons. And, while she would likely disagree, I've not been an out-and-out "fuck no, and fuck off" asshole on most of them. But I'm very discerning, and a cat can fit the vibe check for her and not me, or me and not her, and that's fine. It has to be right, it has to be something we both want. We are, after all, adopting what amounts to a child.
There have been other circumstances too -- the apartment we rented for five years had a limit of two pets (we still had the three old farts, and just didn't tell them -- but it would have been very hard to hide a fourth in a place so small). We did adopt a fourth one time and it very quickly didn't work out and had to give him back, so that has cast a pall over our adoption thoughts for a very long time that was only really lifted by Hank.
It is true over the years that there are cats that I absolutely wanted that Daisy had no interest in whatsoever, even after meeting them, because the vibes just weren't there for her -- and I wasn't going to fight her on it because she'd been in that situation before too. Other times, cost was a factor, stress was a factor, etc -- but most times if either of us have ever found a cat we've really liked and wanted, it's been very quickly adopted out from under our proverbial noses by someone else.
That may have happened this time as well.
We expected the little black cat to be posted on the website or otherwise made available by tonight. She was not. We went to the shelter this evening to look around. She was not there. By the time we'd returned home, she'd been completely wiped off the "lost pets" section of the website, which is generally the "these are the cats that are going to be available for adoption in the next few days" because, well, it's basically the page that shows strays that were brought in. Hank was one of those, I'm sure.
She was gone off of any and all listings. We can only assume that she was either claimed, or (darkly) that when she was brought in, she was very sick and later died. We'll never know.
This...upsetted me more than I thought it would, really.
"It wasn't meant to be," Daisy said, sadly.
I still checked the site multiple times just to see if they were in the middle of updates or something like that the first time we checked. Nothing. She is gone as if she never existed.
I have often said that with Hank, I was satisfied and that I did not want another cat. But this one, for some reason, hurts to lose -- and I never even got the chance to meet her.
I might just be being emotional.
Anyway.
The VHS to PC video card cable arrived, and I very cautiously hooked up the VCR to try it out with the tapes I made from 9/11. Surprisingly, the VCR does still work normally, and the tapes -- while a bit degraded (22 years old, recorded off broadcast television, etc) work just fine -- a time capsule from a time this country faced its greatest crisis of my lifetime.
The first tape was digitized tonight, all six hours of it, to the tune of twenty-two gigabytes of video. But, for six hours of video...I don't really think that's too terrible. It is not great video, to be sure, but it IS video.
The next step of Christmas now goes into motion -- Daisy and her parents have a massive amount of tapes of home movies from the 80s and 90s, some of them events, some of them just around-the-house stuff apparently -- and my goal is to gather as many of them as possible to begin the digitizing process, put the digital videos on flash drives/portable hard drives, and then have that be Christmas gifts for the family.
It is a very long, time-consuming process. It's a 1:1 transfer time -- meaning if the tape is six hours long, it has to play/record all the way through to get it digitized. It's not like you pop it in, press a button, and it's done in five minutes -- oh no. It's done in real time, baby. Which means if I want this stuff done for Christmas, I need to start now. It's December 1st; I have 24 days.
I do not, of course, have flash drives large enough to do this yet. My own backup portable HDD is only 500GB and is close to a decade old, and is what I use to make backups of my PC's files -- once every 2-3 weeks, in the event that I have another catastrophic computer failure. I have another 500GB portable HDD that I use for all of my music -- all of the albums I ripped during the pandemic while I was buying random batches of CDs off eBay, as well as all music I've purchased or downloaded over the course of the past twenty-plus years. But obviously, if I want to get this stuff off my PC once it's all converted, I'll need something easy and something cheap -- some $12, 128GB flash drives off Amazon are likely the solution, but I'll need to order those. Today is payday, finally, so we'll see what I can do. After all, I have to get the tapes first, and the VCR has to keep working long enough to get everything off them.
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