Getting the computer working again so I can write. I’ve missed it. A lot.
Working on more photobooks. And recycling all the art because the photos will last a lot longer and won’t fall apart as easily as most of the projects.
A final few days before I’m back to the work treadmill.
Being organised enough to have planned several small treats for myself well in advance.
New books from the library. I can’t say it enough, I ADORE our library.
Using everything up. Two not great old bags of coffee beans made one nice jar of ground coffee once they went through our grinder.
Homemade pizza on Saturday and Sunday.
Finally organising our photos and developing a system to manage the thousands of images we’ve accumulated over the years.
Getting myriad small jobs done once we actually decided to get started.
Drawers with nothing in them. Always nice to have extra space.
Sorting through the remains of the school year and planning more photobooks so we can recycle all this art guilt free. I adore the ones from Google photos I’ve ordered.
The glass backsplash we splurged on for our kitchen. It is beautiful and shiny and sleek and minimalist and I love it every time I look at it.
Holiday time on the way. France here we come (again).
This podcast episode. We don’t live in a small home but there’s always something to be gained from listening to how other people live their lives.
Eight weeks of maternity leave left. Going to focus on the joy of this and not the return to work.
This is one of the photos that made the cut for a hastily thrown together 2018 photobook. I decided convenience was worth the price of getting it via Google photos. I picked photos from the selection I took with my phone, went for an automatically generated layout and hit order. It arrived within a week and I was delighted with it. The quality was superior to some others we’ve ordered and I’m amazed that photos from my phone came out so well.
With this in mind, and given my current focus on decluttering and organising and getting on top of things, I decided to tackle another project. My children’s art from years of Montessori has been in our attic for many months. In a middle of the night breastfeeding session I started looking into what people do with stuff like this and one recommendation was a photobook.
My lazy streak reared its head and I contacted a company which you can box up and send the stuff too. It will then photograph it professionally and make a photobook. Sounded very convenient, but the price was far more than I was willing to pay. Sometimes my frugal streak overcomes my love of convenience.
I told myself I could EASILY do this myself, sure look at the fantastic pictures my trusty phone took and the fabulous photobook I made with no effort at all. So I decided it would take no longer than an hour to take the photos and another hour to make the albums up and no time at all to produce and order two photos and I could smugly pat myself on the back and tell myself the savings were well worth it because I would have the satisfaction of doing something myself.
I continue to be surprised by how naive I can be about many things. It took a week of work to take the bloody photos. I had to snatch time when I could, the sunlight was a bit of a battle and extracting staples from paper made my fingers sore. I had to do a lot more editing of the pictures than I expected and I had fiddle around with the layouts a lot more.
The books are printed and on the way. I hope they’re worth it, but in the end I am grateful that I had to learn a couple of new skills and going the DIY route was satisfying in many ways. The process also made me sort out our photos of other life events and being a bit more organised in this regard does spark joy.
Photos have been the most irritating part of decluttering. We’ve lugged a large box containing a random assortment of snaps from college days, holiday photos and professional shots around for years. The box had loose photos, instax photos, some albums which were falling apart, a ‘nice’ box from our wedding photographer and loads of envelopes from the days when you had real film to be developed. This is in addition to what must be thousands of digital images on phones and camera cards.
I’ve spent a fair bit on very plain albums and discarded a lot of blurry images, pictures of people I don’t recognise and unflattering portraits. I went through a range of emotions while doing so, from mourning my much younger, slimmer self to laughing at the fashions to remembering good and bad days. Part of the reason I had long fingered this part of the Konmari process was my certainty that this would be difficult mentally, and it was.
We’re about 90% of the way there. There’s a pile or two left to sort through and one last album to fill. I’ve already ordered and received a photobook of images from 2018 and thanked my lucky stars that we probably won’t ever be sorting through this number of physical photos again.
Seeing this in the window of the Oriel Gallery. One of our favourite artists, we have two pieces already and are very tempted by more.
A week and weekend with no rush and nowhere to be.
Handmade knitted cardigans and their wearer.
The trailer for Derry Girls 2.
Finally getting on top of our photos. New albums of old photos are a lovely thing to have.
My daughter took this photo from our bedroom window. It’s clearly not the best picture, given how blurry it is and the fact it isn’t a particularly exciting shot. She was so happy with it that it made me think about how hard on myself I can be. I wish I could be as happy as my daughter was with this photo whenever I accomplish something.
We have a lot of photos. There are photos everywhere, on phones, on old SD cards, on current SD cards, in WhatsApp and Instagram accounts….there are too many to ever look at again, duplicates beyond count, many blurry images and many that spark no memories whatsoever – I have literally no idea who I’ve been photographed sitting next to at a college ball a decade and a half ago.
Last year, immediately following our holiday in France I made up a photo book, tweaked it a bit, left it sitting in the saved folder of the photo book company until I got a discount code that made it affordable enough, ordered it and that was our Christmas gift to each other. We’ve looked at it several time since and I’ve told myself one day I would eventually start organising our current holiday snaps.
Yesterday we had a rare weekday off together and the huge box of photos that had haunted and taunted me for months was taken down, dusted off and sorted out. I was a bit more clinical, a bit more ruthless and the main priority was getting the photos into some of the albums we had and getting rid of more and generally starting somewhere. I was inspired a little by this post from Erin Boyle of Reading My Tea leaves, in that in a world where we’re swamped by the photos we take the best plan is to Start Somewhere.
So we’ve started, and today I continued and there’s a half finished photo book for this years holiday lurking in the depths of a Snapfish account. I’m happy that at least its half finished, instead of never started.
Last year I bought an Instax camera on impulse. I loved it. It came on holidays with us and I enjoyed having Real Photos instead of who knows how many digital images that would probably never see the light of day. Then, disaster struck. It was dropped on our tiled kitchen floor and the plastic bits at the front popped out. I scooped up everything, popped the bits and camera into a ziplock bag, shoved it in a cupboard and then told myself to get the camera fixed every time I opened said cupboard and saw the bag.
This week, I had some spare time before work so I popped along to the camera shop where I bought it and asked about having it fixed. I was told it was probably not worth it, based on the cost involved, and I accepted that, put everything bag in the ziplock bag, put the bag in my handbag and went on my way. The bag haunted me on my bedside table this week, a table I like to keep clear or with only a book or two and a lamp on it.
Tonight, I looked at the bag, took the pieces out and thought to myself that even though I am no engineer and have very little patience surely it couldn’t be that complicated. When himself came home, I handed him a project after dinner. Some 15 minutes later, our beloved Instax was back in business, the proof of which was an extremely unflattering picture of the two of us.
I am going to try to make do and mend more. I have a terrible weakness when it comes to waiting for things. I want them here and I want them now, and the monetary cost is usually something I’ve been willing to put up with. I need to pause, look, think and act in a more considered way. I have a working camera now. And I love my husband.
As per my previous post, one project on my to-do list was sorting out my photos. I was feeling productive last night as it’s a light week in work so I gathered all the photos from broken frames, various boxes and a couple of bags and started sorting.
It was a lot harder than I expected. I found a lot of photos from college days that I’d tucked away and forgotten about completely. It was difficult looking at my younger, slimmer self. Like the Sunscreen Song told me when I was 18, I was not as fat as I imagined.
Looking at the photos was like looking at a different person, which, in many ways, I was. I am not the person I was when I was 18 and starting college, or the 23 year old I was the day I graduated, or the 25 year old visiting Barcelona, or the 28 year old getting engaged in Sorrento, or the 29 year old getting married and going on honeymoon.
My new year’s resolution was to join and gym and improve my health and, if I’m honest, my self esteem. The photos gave me pause for thought. That skinnier, younger woman wouldn’t have believe the older, softer, rounder (in many more ways than my figure) woman if I told her what paths her life would take her.
That skinnier younger woman hadn’t evolved much in her thinking on abortion rights. She knew little of the eighth amendment. She hadn’t developed the ability to see more of the world in shades of grey rather than in black and white. She didn’t give herself (or many others) much of a break. She was too hard on herself.
The photos have been sorted-ish. I haven’t seen albums I like and I don’t really feel like looking through many of them again so soon. Thirty Five is not Twenty Five, in all sorts of ways.
Orchids on my budget 