Thursday, January 6, 2011

My New Year's Resolution

I don' usually do a new year resolution. But this year I'm changing that. Oh! I'm not promising to have one from now on, but this year, I have one.
  For Christmas I wanted to make my son a scrapbook with pictures we took of him on his birthday aboard a pirate cruise. I wanted to write it out like a children's story book starring him.  To do this though I had to first find the pictures.  I have a big black box I bought from a friend when she decided that selling Creative Memories would solve her financial woes (she doesn't sell it anymore) but this big box holds a couple thousand pictures - and I had this thing full.  While looking for the pirate pictures I found my baby pictures and the pirate pictures and everything in between.  Why have all these pictures if I'm just going to leave them in this box?  I got a paper bag and I dumped the box on my bed.  People, I looked at every last one of those photos! Some of them had been given to me by relatives and I had just tossed them in and had never actually looked at them.  Boy was that an emotional trip down memory lane.  Anyway, I tossed bad photos (remember film when you didn't know what you were gonna get??) and copies (I'm ashamed to admit how many times I must have double ordered double prints) and anything where I have multiple shots of the same thing (Do I really need 11 pictures of my son smiling at me from the bouncy seat in the same outfit?? I think not.) I tossed almost half that box. Then I went and bought myself a big album, just the kind you slide pictures into and I filled it with my pictures from my parents wedding picture to the day before I met my husband.  I organized everything left in the box so I can frame or scrap book it in the future and then I actually did get that book made for my son.
      But that was all before Christmas and leads to my New Year's Resolution.  I'm going to go through the pictures on my computer.  Yeah, this is worse than the box.  I never empty my memory chips so every time I hook my camera up it re-copies every picture onto my computer. The file labeled Halloween pics has everything from my sister's wedding two years ago to, well, Halloween. And every file is like that. Plus, pics that have been e-mailed to me or file shared, or, well, however it got there. The point is there are pics in the five digit range on my computer. I'm going through them, erasing duplicates ( How did I end up of 22 copies of the picture of the back of my head that my husband accidentally took that I thought I deleted off the camera???) getting them into the right file, deleting bad ones (see above mentioned picture). My hope is that by the end of the year, I'll have more of these printed and I'll have actually done something with them.  It's a lofty goal. But these are our memories, this is the story of our life. We only get one and I don't want to forget where we have been and the moments we have shared. But mostly, I don't want to be sitting here in another five years with an even BIGGER mess on my hands - better to start tackling this now.....

No comments:

Post a Comment