I've spent this entire dark rainy day organizing 2007 and 2008, a strange and possibly pointless task. You see, I launched a giant project about a week or so ago when I decided that it kind of sucked not having actual photo albums. For many years I was completely obsessive about my photo albums - I would get film developed and immediately put it in meticulously ordered albums. I have one for every year from about 1990 (I was too busy having fun in the 80s to give a shit about photography) on, right up to the advent of my first digital camera in 2005. That was when I decided it would be okay just to look at pictures on Flickr because, hey, times had changed and who needs hard copies?
Well. It is not okay, really, and I turn out to need hard copies and so I went ahead and made a photo book of 2009, using Snapfish, who I am happy to recommend. I picked pretty much only images with people in them and ignored art (art can take care of itself - people look at photo albums to see themselves, not some dumbass landscape full of mist.) I was planning to do the same for 06, 07 and 08, or, that is, I was planning it until I got to the checkout, where I was greeted with a crash course in fiscal responsibility and so I decided to do it the old fashioned way.
Yes, of course it is really hardly any less expensive to order prints of all the album worthy photos from three whole years, running at around 230 photos per year, and then go buy old fashioned albums from Target, but, well, it was slightly cheaper. Slightly Cheaper! That's my mantra! I had this idea that when the prints came they would be all neatly organized in the same order in which they were uploaded. Ha ha! I am naive! No, what I got was a box of roughly 600 photos all mixed together and so I have had to sort them by year and by month, using a page of thumbnails as a guide and I am here to tell you that that whole process took about 16 straight hours. My eyes are bleary but everything is done except 2008. 2006 is in a pretty album with a cheesy quote on the front; 2007 is in a nice green album, 2009 was all done online and arrived with a classy purple linen cover and 2008 is going to be black.
It's been interesting, going through each year like this. 2006 was not, it turns out, such a bad year. 2007 was completely insane; a roller coaster year of extremes and craziness and loss and passion and madness and at the time, of course, I thought it was terrible. That was before I realized that the worst 2007 had to offer was equivalent to the best days of 2008. I cannot say much kind about 2008 except that it is thankfully well over and it made me appreciate 2009, a year in which not much happened and, most importantly, nobody I love died. 2009 was okay. It was just fine. Nobody died and it turns out that that is really fucking important, possibly the only ultra important metric, when you go to measuring up years.
In other news, Susan and I went to the Riverlink fundraiser Brews Cruise Winter Warmer yesterday afternoon/evening and it was really fun. We had some great beer and some not so great beer and met some cool new people and I braved the food line and got oysters, yay, and lowcountry boil, even more yay in a way, for my trouble. Then we went to LAB, the incredibly trendy cool new place on Lexington which was, yes, trendy and cool, with exciting curvilinear walls and changing colored lights and a betta in a big jar on the bar and, yeah, it was nifty and the beer is good and perhaps I will return someday in the future when I'm more trendalicious. One can always hope.
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