30 March 2021

Despite what my husband might try to tell you, I have quite a good sense of direction. Admittedly, my skills have been mothballed quite a bit since the invention of electronic devices who know exactly where you are going, how long it will take you to get there, which is the most direct or time effective way of getting there, and will give you gentle reminders about when to turn corners. Apart from the last part of that sentence (‘gentle reminders’), I could of course be describing my husband. The difference is that the gps can be silenced. And “recalculating” is much nicer than saying “I told you so”.

But I willingly confess to getting lost on a regular basis. I did it earlier today, sitting at my study desk. Specifically, sitting near the scanner on my study desk.

My oldest son has posted online some pictures of his two sons, which reminded me of photos I’d taken 30 years ago of MY two sons, so I thought I could scan the older photos and send them to my son, to show him how nice he used to be to his little brother. Once, a long time ago.

While I was there, I got distracted by the project I’m doing for a nephew, scanning some of his old photos. From there it was only a hop, skip and jump before I’m on photoshop editing photos that my grandmother took around eighty years ago.

I get distracted VERY easily by photos. Specifically digitising photos. Or negatives. Or slides. And then tweaking them where I can.

I have bookcases full of photo albums that are half empty. Not because I never got around to filling them up, but because over the years I’ve gone to them to find a particular photo, removed it and scanned it, and never returned it to the original album.

My shoddy filing system follows through to the computer where all these digitised photos end up. There are very neat folders in the ‘photos’ hard drive, don’t get me wrong. I’m a very good filer.

It’s just that these folders generally have titles like “scans March 21 for sorting”. There are a lot of these type of folders.

There are, of course, easy rules to follow in this sad sort of situation – you blame your parents. And I can quite comfortably blame my Dad for this – my siblings and I have many memories of ‘slide nights’ as kids. Out came the slide projector, the boxes and boxes of slides, off went the lights, and away we went on a magical mystery tour. The slides were either upside down or back the front, and while the box clearly stated ‘family’, it was always a myriad of ancient people no one knew, pictures of rocks or flowers, or scenery from a trip that Dad and Mum would spend five minutes discussing where it might possibly have been from. Every. Single. Slide.

You won’t believe how much I wish I could go back in time and sit through a other slide night.

It was always my plan that when we went into lockdown for any length of time, I’d sit at the computer for days on end, and put all those photos into files related to the family group or category (and yes, some of my categories might have been ‘rocks’ or ‘flowers’). That obviously didn’t get to happen, because lockdown also meant my husband was working from home in the office area, and obstructing my photo sorting plans.

If I didn’t have that excuse, I would have found another. I have a lot of excuses, filed neatly away on the computer, in a folder called “Excuses to be sorted”.