Picture It

I wasn't planning on posting anything today. Everything exciting is happening tomorrow anyway. But I'm off of work and it's snowing out, which in Seattle basically means the apocalypse, and it just feels like a very bloggy kind of day to me. So blog I will. I guess.

My latest project is family photos. I've mentioned before how important family photos are too me. Being pregnant really makes me want to surround myself with all of these beautiful pictures of my childhood and of my parents when they were young and unencumbered with parenthood and of both of my grandmothers, whose memories are fading.

My parents on their wedding day in 1979.

My dad spent ton of time, when I was young, carefully picking out the best of the pictures he took, and artfully arranging them in big fancy albums. Not the cheap kind with sleeves for the photos, but the full sticky page with protective cover variety. There are probably twenty of them, mostly documenting from the early '80s on, but a couple with the earlier stuff.

These pictures aren't super accessible to me anymore, now that I am no longer living in my parents house. In the age of the internet you kind of expect everything to be at your fingertips with the click of a button. And I worry about their fragility, printed decades ago, degrading every day. Someday they will be lost forever.

Baby Astrid with parents visiting family in Toronto.

So, in conjunction with Kyle and I not having a lot of extra cash right now, for my Christmas gift to my parents I am painstakingly scanning all of our family photos, and uploading them all to a specially created Flickr account, so we can have them with us forever.  It's slow going. It certainly won't be done by Christmas, especially considering that after we finish with the physical albums there are disc upon disc of unorganized digital photos.  I'm in over my head, I know, but time is taking its toll, and some pictures are in bad shape already. So this is my project, for probably the next 20 years.