Not The Devil's Playground

Still waiting for my camera cradle to come in the mail but wanting to come closer to my goal of photo organization I've spent the morning uploading photos from the past few years to Shutterfly. I ordered a few prints after Christmas and they looked great--like the kind of prints you want your grandkids to find in a shoe box some day and wonder about the person you used to be before you were old and slow and boring and maybe even dead. My shoe box of prints fantasy pulled me away from wanting to organize a professionally printed book and pushed me towards printing my photos and organizing them in a proper photo album. A traditional album. Not a scrapbook with swirly metallic lettering, rubber stamp art, and layers of patterned paper but a large solid book, preferably a dark color of linen, with photos in groups, a few notes to revive my memory in decades to come (Christmas 2008: John--that sort of thing) and tissue between the pages to protect the photos.

A friend at work put together a collection of photos as a Christmas gift for her boyfriend. He recently adopted a Jack Russell/Australian Shepard mix puppy that has turned him into the emotional equivalent of an eight-year-old girl with her first kitten. It's very sweet and my friend loves to tell stories about his new giddy, concerned, and protective nature because after six years of dating she's learning new things about him that she didn't think were there. But her photos. They're adorable because the pup is adorable and because she has a fair knack for taking photos. But she printed them on her photo printer and they look like it--like a home brew. The quality of the Jack Russell pictures is what makes it worthwhile for me to spend hours uploading.

Filtering through the photos I realized that I have quite a few of things I've made and I like looking at them. They remind me of the planning and the process and the satisfaction of completion.

A small collection of things I've made: