christmas is here before you know it

My wife has shifted her emphasis in art from painting to printmaking and drawing. Though I don’t help her in the creation process, I get involved in other ways. Her website has been a large part of this. One of the original issues was getting her art online so that people could see more of her stuff than what she was displaying at the time. With paintings the easiest way the digitalize them was by camera, but with prints since it is just a sheet of paper, scanning them is a lot easier.

We initially used various scanners on the university campus. It was easy when we were up there a lot, but lately just getting to Fayetteville is a big deal. We have also used her brother’s which has just got for his work related needs. That was nice but still a hassle of having to go over to their house. Amber had a backlog of stuff that needed to be scanned so it took us almost a full day of scanning to get caught up. Amber and I both have made comments about how it would be nice to have a scanner at home to do this stuff with. Amber has been blogging a lot lately and would be nice for her to be able to instantly upload stuff after she’s made something; instead of waiting for a good opportunity to go somewhere to get it scanned.

So recently Amber made a simple comment on her blog, “i wish i had a scanner.” And low and behold, a friend commented that she had an extra one sitting in a box for the last year that she could have. She brought it by yesterday afternoon. It was such an amazing gift; gifts are so much better when you don’t really ask for them or expect someone to fulfill your wishes.

Christmas is coming soon, and questions about what we are getting/giving are already coming up. Knowing that on Christmas you will have something, is nice, but not knowing that you are getting something and then getting it some other time of year is so much better. I don’t really like giving gifts during the holidays because it is so expected that the gift isn’t really a gift anymore, but simply what one does. I do love to gives gifts during other parts of the year, simply because the unexpectedness of it, makes it so special. I wonder how I could learn from this experience, to create an excitement in gift giving within the holiday.

I was somewhat worried about how ubuntu would play with the scanner. I searched around the ubuntu forums and found eerything I needed. I am using Xsane. After installing that via apt-get, I wasn’t getting very good results, though i did get it to scan. So after a little more looking I found that maybe I needed to add one more thing, libsane-extras. That did the trick; it is basically an added collection of drivers. So no messy terminal or config editting—that made me happy—though ubuntu didn’t do anything for me to show that it recognized the scanner, not until I opened the program. I guess I am used to windows where it will pop up in the taskbar, everytime you plug in anything.

Here is the first thing I scanned, while getting it setup. It is a picture my daughter made—she takes after her mother. I would interpret those as birds not flying ‘M’s, but I wouldn’t put that past her either. She is into that crazy surrealism type stuff.