-
purging boxes
I’ve spent this afternoon Getting Rid Of Stuff. Some of this was of the prosaic “empty the trashes” nature, but the bulk of it was involved in going through boxes that have been sitting around with the intent to be gone through. The big thing to tackle was a large box of received correspondence from roughly 1990-1998. A few months ago in another one of these Getting Rid Of Stuff binges I almost threw it out wholesale, but held off, and days later realized with a shock that I was really glad I hadn’t tossed it, because the 4 page handwritten letter that AC Crispin wrote to me when I was 15 and had asked for writing advice from her was in it.
So today I opened the box with the intention to find that letter and throw everything else away.
I threw a *lot* of it away. Probably 75% of it, some of which were letters from (now) complete strangers. A few of them I remembered after a while, but others? I genuinely had no idea who they were. So those weren’t so hard to part with. Neither, as it turned out, were most of the letters I had from people I *do* remember and am mostly still in contact with.
I found the AC Crispin letter. I *also* found the letter from Anne McCaffrey, inviting me (and the friend I was travelling with) to Dragonhold, after I’d written to her before my first trip to Ireland and said I had to ask, at least, if I might be able to meet her. I didn’t think I still had that, so that was a lovely thing to discover.
I also found a number of letters from my grandmother, who died several years ago, and an old (really old, like, 6th grade!) journal, and a Beauty and the Beast short story I wrote around 1991-92 and which I’m considering posting, unedited, to my Patreon page, now that I’ve switched it over to being a short story project. :) And a bunch of other somewhat random memento-style stuff, much of which can probably be thrown away but which has for the moment gone back into the box because I’d done enough for the day.
The thing that really got me, though, in going through the box, was that I found what I had been sure would be the last pictures I’d ever see/take of a friend of mine who was very, very ill with Crohn’s, at a Christmas party in 1997. She was 5’8″ and about 92 pounds, and we all thought it would be her last Christmas.
It was not. She had surgery not very long after that, and she is alive and well and strong, and tomorrow is in fact what she calls her Phoenix Day, the 17th anniversary of her surgery, but my God, seeing those pictures. #feels
So I’m very very glad I didn’t just throw the box out.
-
great photo archive project
I thought maybe I’d tackle the Great Photo Archiving Project again and took out the box of photos I’d weeded down from literally thousands to…well, probably still over a thousand, really, but no longer three or five thousand.
However, I have been pretty much instantly defeated by realising this is a job that basically requires having every photo album I’ve got opened on a table in front of me so I can figure out quickly where to rough-sort the pictures. I mean, they’re rough-sorted already, but unless I actually have the albums out so I can be putting them away it’s pretty meaningless. And having 15 albums and a couple thousand photos lying on the table is not really something an almost-5-year-old is going to be *helpful* with, despite his best efforts, so…I’m defeated.
It’s one of those…”it probably wouldn’t take *that* long if I could just sit down and do it” things (where “that” long is probably 2-5 hours, depending on my level of motivation), but at the most I have about half an hour at any given time, and that’s only enough time to start making a real mess and not even get it cleaned up. And this is the *easy* part of the GPAP; the *hard* part is getting my act together and scanning all this stuff in. But I concluded a long time ago that I had to get them winnowed down and into albums first, because the actual scanning could take years.
I also have a dream of going through my TENS OF THOUSANDS of digital photographs and having photo books of those printed up too.
I also have a dream of owning less stuff, too. I may be going about it wrong. #sigh
-
storytelling son
Poor Young Indiana has an ear infection, so I was snuggling with him last night he suddenly pressed up and proclaimed, “When magic begins!” Then he snuggled back down, saying, “A story about when magic begins afwwfl s fllfh sllghh,” and went back to sleep, leaving me lying there going, “NO, WAIT, STOP, I WANT TO HEAR THIS ONE!!!”
This morning, hopefully, I asked him if he could tell me a story about when magic begins, but he just laughed at me. :)
He got about 8 hours of sleep last night and I got 4 or 5. We’re both pretty obliterated. My ambitions today have been scratched in favour, apparently, of sitting tiredly on the couch and going through hundreds of photographs as part of the Great Photographic Archival Project.
It is sheerly amazing how many out-of-focus pictures of high school crushes that I felt it was necessary to keep, and how few of them I still think are cute. OTOH, there are a handful of pictures of hot-bodied young men in Speedos (I was on the swim team) which, although I have no earthly use for all except one of them, they’re lovely to look at. :) Also, there are an inordinante number of pictures of people at whom I look and go “yeah, okay, I knew that person once, but I have *no idea* who they are…”
One of the envelopes had what was possibly the only bottle of perfume I’ve ever owned spilled on it several decades ago. I can tell, because it still smells of it. I still think it’s a nice sweet flowery perfume. :) (Also, amazingly enough, only the very top photo was ruined, in that stack.)
Anyway, I’ve thrown out far, *far* more pictures than I’ve kept, and what’s left can no doubt stand another cull, but I still have thousands left to go through in this first round before I have to think about that.
God I know how to have fun. :)
-
weekend report
Yesterday morning I got out of bed and discovered I had screwed up my back somehow while sleeping. The weekend has not been *especially* fun, as a result.
Despite this, I took Young Indiana to a movie this morning. He only lasted through 30 minutes of the film (Planes: too boring for a 3 year old) and we went to lunch and did some shopping afterward. He was incredibly, incredibly good and helpful and sweet, but I ended up carrying too much, and with my back hurting it just…yeah. God. I came home and nearly collapsed of weeping exhaustion, although at some point I turned to put something away and my back popped in a shocking manner and the pain lessened.
I spent the remainder of the afternoon in my rocking chair, which has the best back support, reading Cassandra Clare’s CITY OF LOST SOULS. I guess she’s done something right with those books, as I’ve read all of them within the past month.
We finished s1 Jericho, which left us gasping in shock. We thought we had one more episode, so it was doubly shocking to get to the end and have Netflix tell us s2 would start in 20 seconds. But we instead watched Thor as a unicorn chaser, because dear grod.
I had totally forgotten Jeremy Renner was actually Hawkeye in that film. I remembered Hawkeye was in it; I did not remember ever seeing his face. But lo! Lookit that! There he was! Cool. :)
Yesterday’s Great Photo Archive Project involved emptying a box of photos & 20-year-old correspondence, by way of putting off decisions about the correspondence by shoving it into another box with other things of that nature, and by sorting and ditching many photographs, and putting the rest into albums.
Odds that I need to keep roughly 27 photos of actor Stan Kirsch: 0%.
Odds that Sarah and Christie will murderize me if I scan & post some of these photos of *them*: 100%.
Odds that I’m going to anyway: 100% :)
Tonight’s Great Photo Archive Project yielded about 200 photos of my sister’s wedding, a dozen or so worthy glacier/Alaska pictures, an equal number of pictures of visiting friends, and one utterly bewildering roll full of people I’ve never seen. My working theory is that it might be a drama trip that Dad brought students on…?
I haven’t yet gotten these ones into albums, but once I do, I’ll be down to one large box of photographs. I suspect it’s the one that’s actually *crammed full* of photos, and all things considered, it’s probably for the best that I inadvertantly came at it smallest-to-largest, because this way I’ve gotten at least 1000-1200 photos put into albums. (Albumed, I said, just to make Mom twitch. :))
-
The Great Photo Archive Project
For years I’ve wanted to start scanning in all the photos of my yout’, sorting them out, and putting them in photo albums. I have also wanted to actually PRINT OUT digital photos so I could put them into albums.
Today I have begun The Great Photo Archive Project. If I’m lucky, it won’t take me the rest of my life.
I will probably (probably) be able to restrain myself from posting ALL THE PICTURES, but a few to start with will amuse me, as they have already done on Facebook. :)
