Holy Labor Day, Batman! Summer’s over already?
I spent my vacation buried in family photos...
The first hint that Summer’s over comes late in the afternoon, when the sun is low enough to highlight the fine layer of dust that’s collected on my dark wood floor since I swept 24 hours earlier.
The daily dust display puzzles me. I have no pets. It’s not garden dirt since I no longer have a garden. It’s not street dirt, since I keep my triple-pane condo windows shut to block traffic noise. So where does it come from?
One clue: it’s thickest under the two chairs where I sit most often: at my desk and at the kitchen counter. My reluctant conclusion is that I’m the source. I am shedding. No wonder I’m getting shorter and slimmer every year.
They say “if you can’t fight it, join it.” The past couple of weeks I’ve been on a shedding rampage. Excess books to Powells. Excess clothes to William Temple House. And excess photos….OMG! a rabbit hole so deep I’m still stuck in its catacombs.
A family foto fetish? My mom, who was a terrible photographer, used to say “I come from a long line of famous photographers,” as she lined us kids up by the fireplace for another terrible Christmas picture. Her claim was legit though, because her grandfather, father, and two brothers ran the Bachrach studios, capturing the portraits of presidents, society folk, and regular folk—like members of our extended family, going back to 1900. A giant box of ancestral residue sits under my bed.
I also had hundreds of my own photos— in albums and shoe boxes going back seventy years to my first Brownie camera. Before I downsized to this tiny condo, I sorted through them all (or so I thought) and sent the best ones off to be digitized. When the thumb drives came back I uploaded the photos to my computer, where they dwelled in dozens of anonymous folders. Each photo was titled something inscrutable, like “0199_p_14ajx8bp62.jpg,” —and all were dated April 17, 2014, when the company scanned them. Then, just in case, I tossed the scanned photos into two 12”X12” boxes and put them on a shelf in my closet.
Meanwhile, since 2009 when I got my first iPhone, I’ve managed to stuff the Photos app on my Mac with 49,722 photos. They do get used. I draw on them for blog posts, and to create our annual family calendars and personal photobooks for special occasions. I just flipped the calendar from August to September:
The imperative to get all the pictures collected and organized under one findable roof in the Photos app became clear as I struggled to put together a photobook for my ex-husband’s 80th birthday. (We’re still good friends and have children in common.) Most of the photos I wanted to use lived in those inscrutable file folders because our marriage ended before I went digital.
Long story short, I’ve spent most of my August vacation on this project. The scanned photos are now incorporated into Photos, in more or less logical albums. My ex’s photobook was a big hit. (We are a silly family…)
Of course each photo brought with it a whole string of memories that carried me directly back to those precious moments:
I could go on and on and on and on. (And I did, with most of the photos.)
But I wasn’t done yet. I had a brilliant idea—a win-win idea. I could free my shelf of those two boxes of already scanned photos AND share those fond memories with my friends and relatives by sending them the photos they were featured in.
I cleared the table then sorted the photos into stacks, some of which were five inches high. After two days I’d traveled down so many pleasurable rabbit holes my brain was fried. I still had about hundred more waiting, but my vacation was over, so I stuffed the stacks into separate labeled envelopes to finish another day.
Unfortunately, I’d decided to store my work-in-progress in that big box under the bed. In the ten years since I last peered inside I’d forgotten what else was in there besides more ancestor photos. Somehow I’d overlooked a whole other shoebox full of prints from the mid-2000s. SHIT!!! I shoved the incomplete project in there, shut the lid, and went to bed.
Maybe I’ll finish the repatriation job in time for Christmas.
Meanwhile, I ran an app that finds duplicate photos (Photosweeper—recommended!) and was able to reduce the contents of my Photos app to only 39,271 photos.
I’m patting myself on the back and will now get on with September, which always seems like the real beginning of the year. I have color clients in the wings and a Zoom presentation next week on using the principles of seasonal color analysis for Seamwork, an organization of “sewists” (people who love to sew their own clothes).
WHAT AMUSED ME THIS WEEK:
A breakdancer of incredible grace and strength.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY from Mark Mansour:
Has anybody noticed that since Biden dropped out we are no longer talking about candidates being too old to serve? This despite the fact that one of the two present candidates will be 82 at the end of his term and is manifesting clear mental decline. Perhaps the corporate media would like to explain this for us, given that all they could talk about for a year plus was Biden’s age and alleged cognitive decline. They are frauds.
Turns out Biden is still on the ball, and Trump is the elderly befuddled one who says things like:
You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon anymore and we are going to get the energy prices down when we get energy down you know this was caused by their horrible energy WIND! they want WIND! all over the place but when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem …
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a guy in charge of the nuclear codes whose brainwires are that crossed.
PUT YOURSELF IN THE WAY OF BEAUTY
Whoa, Paul. Back-dating photos so they sort chronologically will make my eyes cross. I will however check out Photo Mill when the weather turns bad.
Your every post inspires me, Joy. Thank you!