Monthly Archives: October 2013

Pictures are worth thousands and thousands of words

After receiving the news that my 2-Terabyte External hard drive with all of my photos since 2004 is toast, I find myself looking for a back-up plan for any and all photos I’m able to scrounge to save somewhere. I *had* backed up my photos on the Creative Memories Digital Center site. Creative Memories rewarded their loyal customers, some of whom had been with CM since it was Shoebox to Showcase over 20 years ago (ahem, I for one), by claiming bankruptcy (again) and giving us precious little time to purchase any needed supplies for finishing projects (I’m broke so a moot point) and precious little time to salvage any photos or finished digital albums saved on the site. From what I could tell when I did check the site this summer to see if my photos were still there, my only option for saving my photos was purchasing photo CDs. Again, broke. No option to download my own photos and albums for safe-keeping? Thanks a lot CM. The way I understand it, they are “reorganizing” and have “great things in store.” Newsflash Creative Memories, your consultants and loyal customers are ticked off. Good luck with that.

Anyhoo, enough of me venting. The finality of pictures of births of my precious babies, vacations, cute candids, birthday parties, zoo trips, road trips, homeschool field trips, crafts, messes, cooking together, lego constructions, Christmas, concerts, starting our business, foodie pics, friends, family gatherings, et al. being gone forever provided for a restless sleep as I quietly cried myself to sleep Monday night (okay, I whimpered a little). I keep telling myself this world is not my home but I am sentimental and I’ve seen my kids pour over the scrapbooks I have completed. It’s a huge way to pass on the story and the love. I am the curator of the museum of memories and I have failed.

Creative Memories did drive home several points that I did take to heart and need to put back into practice:

Print your pictures. Even if you can’t get to scrapbooking them, print them before you can’t. I took this more seriously when I used film and became lax when I went to digital. I either need to get those digital scrapbooks done or get those photos printed. Backing up isn’t enough. I backed up my back ups and my pics are still gone (did I mention one laptop crashing and then next one being reset to factory settings? I didn’t think so.)
Back up. Nuff said.
Journal. We all have a story to tell and no one else can tell it. Pictures in an album aren’t enough. Example #1: I have a photo of my great, great, great grandmother in one of those old, pretty but deteriorated albums. She was a Cherokee who walked the Trail of Tears, married a white man and here I am. All I have is a photo, which is awesome but I’d give anything to know her story. I wish someone had written it down. The hard times in which she lived and how she overcame would be a story of bullying this culture can’t appreciate. She had to have been a strong woman. I just wish I knew the tale so I could pass it on. Example #2: I have another old scrapbook that I believe my grandmother made. She did some pretty creative stuff, cutting photos into shapes, arranging some on one page into a star shape, but rather than journal who’s in the photos and what’s going on, she cut quotes and captions from magazines and pasted them under the photos. I look at it and get so frustrated because I don’t know why the pictures were taken, who’s in them, what’s going on. SO many cool pics, and I can tell who my dad is and his siblings and parents, but that’s about it.
No…no I cannot identify these. The irony of this page’s title confounds me…Such cool photos, though!

Back to backing up, I’m now reviewing all of the reviews for best photo storing/sharing sites and I will come to my own conclusions and get back to you. If anyone out there has a favorite, let me know! In the meantime, learn from my mistake. Back up your backed up back ups.

What’s not shared (and thank you, God, that I have shared photos on Facebook and my blog) is lost, lost, lost… 😦

Michelle

Posted in Curator of the Museum of Memories

Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That

Oct 14

Posted by zookeeper12

In order of priority of things that need to get done, writing a blog post is at the bottom of my list. “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” (Awful grammar, I know, and the report has precious little to do with this post but no one expresses the sentiment better than this gal.) I still repeat that wise quote, “Ignore the urgent, take care of the important.” This is one reason why I decided I was way overdue for laying some words down. It is why I did NOTHING yesterday because rest is important and we worked our butts off this past week and we needed to recover. (The boys did help our friends by moving their horse’s corral fencing yesterday, not a small job, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised to find you can teach kids to enjoy hard work. They said they were glad to have something to do and got to do something we certainly don’t do around here. Plus the horse was happy to have fresh grass!) It is important that I fit in laundry and school and feeding my crew and reading to my children and cleaning at least some of my house and, and, and….

Here’s the thing; as a business owner, that urgent/important thing morphs into a gelatinous glob and there are things you urgently NEED to take care of because it’s important they happen A.S.A.P. because the health inspector could show up any minute OR, if you don’t enter sales into QuickBooks, you can’t file your sales tax and don’t get me started on that, OR, if you don’t return that call that potential client will find someone else OR, if you don’t post something on HootSuite, people will forget you’re there OR, if you don’t update the website OR, if you don’t test a recipe OR, the bills (need I say more?) OR, OR, OR… All of these ORs monopolize my days and I have only fragments of time to get anything done. One of my husband’s mantras is everyone is given 24 hours in their day. Any homeschooling mom and/or mom of many will read that and wonder how many times I’ve punched my husband. Throw in running a small business and I wonder myself, “how long until I have to hide the evidence?”

I learned a long time ago that I need to take time or myself, to do something that recharges me or I don’t function at optimum levels. My enthusiasm and energy are depleted; I can’t focus and am easily discouraged and overwhelmed.

SO, before I am engulfed by these post-it notes of urgently important things I have to do,

I decided to sit down and just write. It’s not very creative but it’s writing. I miss it when I don’t do it. I need the practice plus it’s where I think and it scares me to consider the possibility that when I go a month or more without writing I haven’t been thinking that whole time!! That should scare everyone. I keep thinking that I will write or read like I used to before the business: at the end of the day when I finally sit down with my feet up after a hard day’s work and sigh and relax with my laptop, notebook or a good read. That was before the business. Now, the end of the day ends with me collapsing too exhausted to read more than a paragraph, a page at most. Forget writing. By that time, writer’s block has become writer’s rigor mortis. Maybe it’s time I became a morning person.