Portland, Oregon: I have no idea where this week went, but as you probably know, I get deep into "projects" during our few short months in Portland and they tend to take-over My Life and the entire house.
The Big Project for last summer (besides going to Asia for a month) was to sort through every photograph in the house. Sort. Organize. Keep or shred. Those kept were sent off to be professionally (and inexpensively) scanned. Then shred. (Yes. We shredded them all.) The returned DVDs were then sent up to clouds and onto external hard drives. No more sticky photo albums. No more boxes of photos. Another empty cabinet.
This summer My Big Projects include going through years of digital photos I had moved to CDs and make sure they were all up in the clouds as well. Nearly all were, so this project only took a few days. Then these CDs were shred.
I know. I am brutal. But I have another empty cabinet to show for my efforts and that feeling is glorious.
If not for this one final purge, I would have never come across this:
Me, age 5-ish.To compensate for all the purging, shredding, and lack of photo albums in our closets, at the end of each year, I make a 12x12 (huge!) coffee table book filled with photos and snippets from my blog as description as necessary. The books serve as gigantic scrapbooks, I suppose, but certainly present better than plastic photo albums, and are something I hope Leo and Lucy will enjoy when they are old and we are no longer around. And it is just one. One book per year. Concise. Manageable.
Dave and I now have 16 of these books - basically produced since I switched to digital film, he retired and we started traveling often. But, I was behind and have just finished our 2015 journal this week. (If you are interested, I produce the books with BookSmart software available free at Blurb, and have the books printed at Blurb - when they are having a sale... which is pretty often.)
It is fun to look back. Fun to remember. Fun to see Leo and Lucy change year by year. (Not fun to see myself age year by year...)
Remember that time we went to Yellowstone?Now that my photo book project has finished and my photo CD project has finished, my "office purge" project begins.
Anyone need a copy of Microsoft Money 2004 Deluxe?
We have left the house. Needing more olive oil, Dave drove me up to Red Ridge Farms for a gallon of their Oregon Olive Mill Arbequina.
Red Ridge Farms is a nursery, a vineyard, an olive oil farm - all combined in a very nice little gift shop showcasing their products and other Oregon foods.
This is a usual stop on our wine country wanderings, as is lunch at Dundee Bistro.
Dundee Bistro
Dundee Bistro
Blistered Padron Peppers in Aioli at Dundee BistroIf we go to lunch late enough, there is no wait... and there is no need for me to make dinner!
But I have done a lot of cooking this past week:
Orange and Fennel Salad with red onion and kalamata
Pad Thai
Mushroom Pizza
I made a few dozen egg rolls for the freezer and fried-up a few one nightOne more photo to share - guess who started ballet?
Lucy is soooo happy "dancing" in her ballet class. She loved her first week of preschool as well. Appropriately named, our Lucy Joy.Until my next update, I remain, your correspondent.