Biding My Time

So how long does it take for one to get their act together? I'm just wondering this as a general question so that I know the appropriate time allotment I'm allowed for certain endeavors. One such endeavor is creating an album of the two years we lived in Grenada. I think I have no end of wonderful pictures (if I include all those I fully intend on stealing from my friend's flicker pages and blogs), and materials to make a most fabulous album. I have many friends who have written creative and descriptive blogs which would make great books/journals of their time in Grenada, but my blog activity has been spotty at best so I think a picture album would be more up my alley (unless I steal all of Julie's blogs and pretend her adventures are my own).

This is one thing that I need to do in the near future. I may or may not be taking courses this Spring, and so I think a good deadline would be end of summer for this project. I don't want to leave it too long, and end up with no memoir at all (which is what happened to my lovely honeymoon album which is still in a "to do" box).

Although I love all the advancements of technology, having all my memories on a flash drive is not quite cutting it for me these days. Why does it seem like such a pain to actually print out pictures into hard copy? And then once you have them, what does one do with them anymore? I am not much of a scrapbooker, but I think albums can still be quite nice and less of a time commitment than the artistic undertaking of a scrapbook.

I am very ashamed to admit that I don't even have pictures of my son to carry around in my wallet! OK, maybe I have one of him on Santa's lap last Christmas (and I'm talking last last Christmas), but it's not really representational anymore, and when I pull out a picture of a 5 month old and then tell my audience that my son is really 18 months old, I think I get funny looks, and I'm sure they're for being a crap mother.

Maybe we need a family pic at the Sears portrait studio with all of us in matching outfits, or with Paul in a sailor uniform or something. Then if I carried this around in my pocket, I would at least have something to show. I think I'm also carrying around pictures of my friend's kids (instead of my own), and my nephew at 2 yrs (he's now 6). It's just pathetic.

But in my defense I am still new at mastering how one actually goes about developing digital pictures in to hard copies. I think I somehow have to take them out of my iPhoto, but them back on the memory stick, and take the memory stick to London Drugs, plug it into the machine and do some printing via computer station. It's all very confusing. The last time I did this, I tried to make my mom a brag book of all her grandchildren, and I ordered all the pictures in the wrong size so that none of them actually fit into the brag album that I bought her. I had to give her the little photo album with a bunch of giant pictures sticking out at all angles and be like "Hey, why don't you take this awkward package to Long Island with you to show all your cousins!" I think she ended up only taking out two pics on their own, and left the whole brag book and the extra pictures behind. It was a very sad attempt at a nice gesture.

So anyway, I would like to make an album, and suppose I should start it soon. Before I have new albums of New York and perhaps Denmark to create (and procrastinate). And hey, you never know. Maybe one day I'll surprise myself (and my husband) and finally finish that honeymoon album too!