I'm happy to report Fred and Woody caught the little mouse shortly after lunch today and mercifully turned the young rodent loose in the woodpile. We would probably have fewer visits from Woody's little playmates if he were not as well fed as he is. He's in the game for the thrill of the hunt, not the satisfaction of a tasty treat.

We're expecting tomorrow to bring cold and windy weather, more typical of January here at Joe's Pond. Groundhog Day is only a couple weeks away and then we'll find out if there will be another six weeks of winter - but of course winter coming to a close by mid-March would be unusual, and no self respecting woodchuck in this neighborhood is going to show up as early as February to predict it one way or another. Perhaps in April . . .

I've started scanning the material in a scrapbook donated this summer to the Cabot Historical Society. Yesterday was my first day working on one donated by the Hubert Wheeler family, and I had managed to scan around 50 photos when I took a break to call my aunt Betty in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. When I came back to the computer I somehow hit a wrong key and it froze up. I tried everything I could think of but it remained unresponsive. My scanning program automatically saves when I exit properly, and I hoped it would work that way when I had to shut down and restart, but deep down I knew that was unlikely. I shut the computer down and lost everything I'd done. Scanning 50 photos may not seem like a big job, but I'm working with very fragile pages, photos that have been glued, taped, bent and written upon, and handling them once is quite enough - however, I went back to the beginning and did them all again, shuddering as additional parts of the brittle black paper of the album crumbled and fell on my desk or on the floor. I'll put it all back together and repair and reinforce the old photo album as best I can using archival glue, and then it will be ready for proper storage. The most interesting part of a project like this is when I begin erasing the tears, waterspots and brown age spots from the pictures on my computer. The end result will be relatively clean and clear copies of all the photos. I'll print copies of all of them to be filed in archival albums. I'll eventually also put them on a CD or DVD so visitors to the historical society building can enjoy them. I don't know how many photos are in the collection to date, but I'd guess several hundred. I've filled four albums and three more are "in progress." I still get a kick out of opening an old album and finding a picture I haven't seen before, or a photo that's not only identified, but dated!
The photo above is of Drew's Hardware Store, probably taken about 1894. Shown from left to right are James Drew, Jessie Drew, Earle J. Rogers (on tricycle), Albro Burnham, Ezra Haines, Lafayette Myers, and Walter Myers sitting on the wood pile. The bottom photo is the window of Banfill's Harness Shop. Both places of business were on Main Street in Cabot, Vermont.