The Scratch

Ok so I’ve decided, with Husband’s help, that we’ll be cleaning out the garage this weekend. Come to find out, it’s also driving him up the wall, so it will be a much-needed task both of us can enjoy the rewards of. Plus, the weather is supposed to be cooler tomorrow, so we won’t die of heat stroke while we’re out there.

All is not lost on the other projects…they’re still on the list. And this one will fulfill a need in my life…the need to organize things. The garage is not really that bad with things out of place, but there are a few. So I can put those things away, maybe create a few new places for some new things, and the garage and I will be all good…at least for a little while.

Come to think of it, there are a few other “organizing” chores on my list that could be accomplished over the next few months during football season and cold weather. I need to catch up on my CD cataloging (that’s right – all 300-something of our CD’s are in a database and arranged in books alphabetically by decade), I need to start a DVD database, and continue the enormous task of scanning old photos so I can eliminate boxes upon boxes of un-albumed photos.

I can hear a collective gasp from all of you Creative Memories people out there. That’s right – once they’re scanned and saved to disk, I’m throwing the photos away! A horrible, awful, terrible concept, I know. But it takes up so much less space and I never look at old photo albums anyway – they just collect dust. For the last ten years or so (not counting the last four years since we’ve had a digital camera), any photos that were taken have just been tossed into a box anyway. Oh, and I feel the need to tell all of you photo freaks out there that I am saving some actual photos – you know, important, meaningful ones. They’ll be confined to one, count ‘em, one single acid-free photo box that sits nicely on a shelf and doesn’t take up enormous amounts of space. So, now I’ll just have the small box and the organized, electronic album CDs and should I feel the need to actually have the photos at some point down the road, I’ll have them printed. Easy enough. Except that the scanning of the old photos is a tedious, boring task that one can only stand to do about 15 minutes at a time. I’ve decided that I just need to move the scanner and PC into the Living Room, put on a good DVD, and scan away. So maybe I’ll get to that in the next couple of weeks…perhaps during the next LAN Party. That way, if there are any issues with the scanner/PC after moving everything, there will be no less than six computer nerds at my disposal to fix it.

So there’s my scratch for my itch. We’ll clean the garage this weekend, and then I’ll do my best to appease myself with free organizing tasks until I get the time and cash to do the decorating stuff. I guess that’ll work…better make a list.