Burning the Midnight Oil

July 1, 2006 at 12:29 am (Family, Personal)

It’s 12:25am, and I’m up baking cupcakes for my mother in law’s birthday, as she requested. I should be working on my in-laws late anniversary gift – but here I am typing. Perhaps I should have been working on any one of these things before right now, but I’ve been busy scanning pictures. I’m up to about 1990 in my entire life’s catalog of pictures. I don’t know why I decided to do this right now. (before I am able to purchase my memory upgrade – sorely needed. I’m down to 10.76GB on my 80GB hard drive. I’m anticipating purchasing a new one as soon as I receive some Paypal money – but surely I’ve got other things to work on in any case.) In the past few years, I have gone through my entire photo catalog (which is in chronological order in album photo sleeves) and scanned all the pictures I thought were especially precious to my mom – to make her “This is your life DVD. And I also did that with my Grandma Mary Gwyn in mind. Over the last 3 days, I’ve been going through and scanning all the pictures I personally loved. 100 of them (spanning 1969 – 1987) were scanned, cropped, adjusted, named & dated and have been imported to iPhoto and MemoryMiner. 161 of them (spanning 1986 – 1990) have had everything done except being imported to iPhoto or Memory Miner. (I’m actually afraid of hogging up too much memory – for now I know I can just move the whole lot of them onto a CD and put them back when I’m ready with more Hard Drive space.)

This whole process has been such a walk down memory lane. I also found myself wondering “Whatever happened to…?” as I easily do. I Googled my old friend Brent Kort – to find that he was in a band in Tucson several years ago, but who knows what he’s up to now. I was kind of bummed, because I didn’t think I had any photo of him, but then I found one of him and Eden, peeking up a slide at a playground. I had just pushed her down. All of it has made me miss my old acquaintances – and has had me thinking long about the people who passed through my life so briefly, but whom I would call dear friends. And then there are the several X boyfriends. My oh my! That got me thinking about the editing process – who do I leave out of my photo montage, and why? Embarrassment? Lack of Hard Drive Space? Just coldly pretending they weren’t there by omitting their photo from the collection? Why am I even doing this? Because I can – and because I am endlessly fascinated by the process.

But I’ve got so much to do before I can go to sleep – and I’d love to get the house straightened up so we can start fresh for the busy weekend. Aside from scanning and general business – I also took the boys out to the beach today for the first time this season. At least it was still in the month of June. It was nice – until I got my messages to find that Trip needed me to scramble and get him at the train station in Long Branch. It wasn’t so bad – he was home early and we had a family movie after dinner – Back to The Future part 3 – after catching parts 1 & 2 the past two nights. Watching that movie and seeing my old high school pictures gave me an unwelcome reminder of the ugliness of the 80’s. The hair was so big!

Here’s a few prize shots from the batch through 1987:

Kindergarten 1975

4th Grade 1978

Senior Class Florida Trip

60’s Day

While I was at the beach, I got started on the finally stitching for my iPod case. I posted pictures of it in my last post, but I realized it was far to flimsy – just one layer of quilting fabric around plastic forms (which are heavy duty quilter’s template plastic sheets.) Every edge seemed like it would just wear through from minor use. I turned the case inside out again, and cut out two layers of heavy weight fusible non-woven interfacing to fit exactly over wrong sides of the inside and outside of the case. Then I fused those layers to both wrong sides and also added some quilt batting to the back (behind the iPod) to cushion it if it ever (God forbid) goes crashing to the ground. You follow? So it’s much thicker now – so much more sturdy. I started to close the opening and hold the forms in place all around it, but decided that I’m going to bead it at the same time – I’ll show pictures when it’s all done, but I’m really happy with the way it came out.

Well, cupcakes are cooling off – time to work on my accordion folded tin album – pics to follow!