Remembering Yesterday
It’s been a busier than usual week for me with school being out and with me wearing my “mom hat” and fulfilling my role as my son’s caretaker in chief on a full time basis. As I mentioned Sunday, I’d planned most of my schedule this week around being available to drop everything and give rides on a moments notice, run to the store with little or no warning because we ran out of something essential, iron a shirt like right now because his friends are waiting outside for him and they’re going to miss the start of the movie, cook a meal because even tho he had forty dollars in his wallet when he left the house it still wasn’t enough to get anything to eat, and more or less forgo anything that I needed to get done for myself.
I have to give a word of respect to women who do make that choice to be full time stay at home mothers because it’s a lot of work, and while I’m pretty close to that because I do most of my work from home, I’ve been able to balance having a career and being a mother pretty well all these years, but even that has been no small feat. Something I didn’t consider as I was planning my weekly schedule and deciding which projects I could work on and which ones would get pushed to next week when the kids go back to school, was that my son is older now, and while he still needs me, he’s achieved a level of independence which has actually left me with more free time on my hands this week than I’d originally planned on having.
As a family we’ve always had an interest in photography, and with digital cameras and DV camcorders becoming more popular in recent years, we’ve managed to accumulate a mishigash of prints, slides, negatives, videotape, mini-dv tape, and digital pictures; all of it spread across our house in a mix of albums, binders, shoe boxes, and spread across our home network consisting of multiple hard drives in multiple computers, and none of it is organized.
I’ve been looking at software alternatives for a while now trying to decide how to best catalog and organize all of the various media we’ve collected, and I’m liking Adobe’s new package Lightroom. I’ve used Picasa and a couple of other free photo organizing packages but none of them really seemed to do the trick for me. We’ve got a lot of gear to consider too, and we need to figure out what kind of format we’re going to go with in the future. (Do other families have these same dilemma or is this just a symptom of my internal geekiness?) :w00t:
My husband hates digital cameras, or at least he hasn’t found one he’s liked so far that was affordable, but we’re looking at the Canon EOS to replace his aging AE-1, and he really likes the look of real film, especially black and white. We’ve got a good quality scanner that we use to transfer prints to a digital format so we can email pictures we shoot to family and friends, and we both know Photoshop pretty well which we use for editing and formatting, and I know I’m being completely anal retentive in wanting to organize all of our pictures, but since I wound up having more free time this week, it seemed like a good personal project to deal with.
As I started going thru old albums and boxes of pictures, I dragged out our old Kodak slide projector and set it up in my office and went thru several trays of slides, then I went thru old albums finding baby pictures, pictures of different places we’ve lived or vacationed. Some pictures my husband took when he was touring, and some I took when I was single; all of them bringing back memories of the past, some good and some bad, but still, they’re my memories.
I have a small FujiFilm digital camera that I use to take snapshots, but my eye isn’t the best for composition. That’s really been my husband’s talent, but I’ve been trying to merge all of these things together and I found some things that I liked that I’d like to share here.
A lot of the pictures I’ve been looking at have reminded me of things I used to do, like skiing or kayaking. This winter has sucked too with hardly any snow whatsoever. I used to ski at Blue Hills just outside Boston all the time, and I even found some pictures of that, tho they’re not very good, and I found some pictures of when we lived in Florida where I first learned to kayak. Some of the pictures I found were of Christmas 2005 when my husband and I first started talking about reconciling and I remembered that he asked if he could come home while we were visiting the Morikami Japanese Gardens.
All little things, but important things, and important to remember that life moves by you with blistering speed, so maybe you should remember to take a picture every now and again. I’m glad I did.
Some Blog News
Some new content in the érotique section, and there’s some news regarding Merck and Gardasil which you can read about here, and some new Geek Girl stuff too! I have to say that I’m really enjoying my journal again, and that’s a good thing. I hope you take the time to navigate around and explore geishaland!
Click the thumbnails to view these pictures.
Hi Nina: I always like to be the first to comment.I don’t know why.
You are so kind to share your everyday life with us, your true fans. I also have scads of slides, photos, and over two hundred Hi8 video films. I do enjoy working, editing, and sharing with my friends, but wish I could find a system, that a pea sized brain like myself to figure out. The Garden pics are very secial to you ,I know. It is stil bitter cold here, but the sun is shining, the wind is blowing and we are alive and well. Best regards to you all.
love
richard