Seasons past, remembering

January 18, 2009

We got a new computer this week. Our apple laptop was over 4 years old [Damien's post publish edit: it was actually 6 years old][Renee's post publish edit: was it really that old? wow] and with my new found love for photography and RAW files that eat up huge amounts of space, our computer was barely crawling along. It was painfully slow to run applications, especially anything to do with photos. That's one reason I rarely edit my photos, except to crop. My computer simply couldn't handle the processing required to be editing lots of photos, it took way too much time. My photos had maxed out our computer's capabilities and since I want to go further and farther, photographically speaking, our plan for the new year was to replace our trusty old friend with something bigger and faster.

With our new computer I'm finally able to start going through all our old photos and organize them according to year and month. When I outgrew iPhoto we moved them over to Bibble but they got all disorganized (because the digital dates were all wrong).

Ack... disorganization seriously bothers me. I like lists, priorities, neat cupboards, menu plans, daily schedules and categorized photos - both developed and digital files. But my old computer was simply too slow to spend time moving all those files to the correct place.

morning chore list: I'm not joking when I say love organization</span>

This past week, over the course of 2 late-nights, I worked my way through 2000-2005. Oh the speed of this new computer...Oh the memories from those years.

This photo, at the top of the post, from late summer 2004 in particular really hit me. There are very few photos of me during these first years of my children's lives. Then, as now, I was behind the camera. Although these days I turn that camera back around on my self quite regularly.

The few photos I do have of me from that life season are nasty. The photo quality is terrible and I look scary. Did I really look that tired? Probably. My babies did not start sleeping well till after their first birthdays. Sometime around this stage I would get pregnant, go through those months, have another baby and start the cycle again.

But this photo cheers me up. My sun-kissed bare arms remind me winter does end. I'm being loved and cared for, the kids are doing my hair - I used to love this back when I had hair longer than an inch. And I'm nursing my toddler. I miss nursing my children. Oh, and my toe nails are painted, back in the good ol' days before I knew about all the nasty chemicals in nail polish.

Nice to know that organizing my photos gives me joy beyond the actual "organizing" part.

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