25 Cents Story - Winter

School is soon to finish before daughter realizes that it will be soon the holiday season again.

On one Saturday morning, "Dad", daughter asks, while Dad is sitting in the sun smoking, "What Mom and you look like when you were in school?"

"We were so skinny that wolves would cry after seeing us." Dad mocks a crying wolf.

Daughter giggles.

"I will show you." Moments later, Dad puts out his cigarette and leads daughter down to his office in the basement. He pulls one box out of the storage room and opens his album to his daughter the first time since she was born.

"Where were you on this one?" daughter asks.

"In the high school I graduated. " Dad replies, "see the color on the edge is fainted a bit..."

"Woh, " daughter flips several pages down and excites, "you really looked cool on this one at that time, and ..." Daughter pauses a bit, and giggles, again, "skinny and so serious..."

"I did not lie to you." Dad winks with a smile face.

"Do you have more?" daughter is obviously eager for another album.

"Here is another one with your Mom. " Dad hands out another album, "Sweetie, I have an idea for you to work on and I am sure you will like it. "

"What is it? Tell me!" Daughter's eyes are twinkling.

"Well, your Mom and I have lots of photos taken a while ago. It occurs to me that probably you could help us digitalize them."

"What do you mean, 'digitalize'?" Daughter confuses about the new vocabulary.

"Oh, I mean, you can use the scanner in my office to scan all photos in these albums in this and other boxes into your laptop," Dad starts his business plan, "give each one a name, organize them in folders, and later transfer them to our external hard drive, such as this one." Dad raises his newly bought external hard drive from his office desk.

"Sounds pretty straightforward. I can do it." Daughter likes the task and cannot wait to start, "but, could you show me how to use your scanner now?"

"Just in a minute." Dad holds on, "For your hard work, I will compensate you. Meaning, I will pay you 25 cents for each album you
finish scanning to the computer in a folder and another 25 cents for transferring them to the external hard drive."

"Also, you need to put those photos back in order as they were in the album; Otherwise, you would not receive full 25 cents. If you ask Mom or your brother to help, you have to pay them 10 cents for each album. However, if you can complete the whole task by yourself, I will give you another 25 cents bonus for every five albums. "

Noticing that she has not learned how to calculate multiplications, Dad raises an example, "For instance, if you complete digitalizing 10 albums by yourself, you will receive 5 dollars and 50 cents."

Dad looks at daughter, "Is it a deal?"

"You bet!" Her voice echoes in the hallway, while she is dashing to upstairs to grab her laptop.

Within couple of minutes, Dad setups the connection between the scanner and Daughter's laptop in the family room as her dedicated workspace.

"You can watch me how to do the first one. " Dad puts out a picture from the album and explains, "Put it face down on the panel like this, close the lid, and click the scan button on the right."

Seconds later, the scanner application pops up on daughter's laptop with a scanned photo image.

"Then, you save it to a location such as here before start scan the next one. Got it?"

"Yep." Daughter nods hard, eager to start her first scanning experience.

Following the agreement, she pulls out the first photo under the lid and inserts it back to the album before laying down another one on the scanner panel.

"Honey, I will be on trip again next week. " Dad pats her on her back, "I will see where you are after I come back. You can ask Mom to help pull the boxes from the storage room and put them back."

"OK. " Daughter nods, while is saving one scanned image file.

On the Saturday morning a week later, Daughter is proud to present her work on both the external hard drive and her laptop to Mom and Dad that she finishes "digitalizing" their albums. As agreed upon, all photos have been arranged back into each album respectively.

Dad is very much pleased by her hard work and hands her the payment as promised. "Honey, you really impressed me. " Dad pats her with a big hug.

"Sure, Dad. " Daughter kisses him on the cheek, "I also have something for Grandma and Grandpa in China. Wait..." As of speaking, she dashes out upstairs again in her room and brings back a pack of CDs with labels on each of them.

"While you are away, Mom said that you would be in China trip soon. " Daughter continues, "So I think I can make a Chinese New Year gift to my dear Grandma and Grandpa. And hope they would like it."

At the moment of speaking, she hands the pack of CDs over to Dad, in which contain a copy of all those photos of Mom and Dad from her scanning work, plus some recent ones from Mom's digital camera, including a few of hers and her brothers.

"Thank you so much, sweetie..." Dad hugs her deeply in his arms...