Digitizing Old Photos

I'm a photographer by trade (or at least I was before baby came along) so photos are almost literally my bread and butter. I love taking them, not just "photographs" but snapshots just to commemorate the occasion. For me no occasion is complete without at least a few dozen snaps. I'd say photos are one of my favorite things in life. They are practically the only decorations hanging on my walls and sitting on the horizontal surfaces. They were also, until recently, taking up tons of space in my house. Photo albums, boxes of photos, a huge steamer trunk full of nothing but photos. The floor of my closet was over run with photo storage. My photos, my husbands photos, our combined photos, photos from other people...you get the picture (get it? Picture?...nevermind) ANYWAY. As much as I love my photographs, the old ones don't get looked at that often. All the time and energy I spent putting them lovingly in albums seems wasted now as they have become just one more thing to dust, and one more thing that is taking up precious space in my house.

So about a month ago I finally pulled the plug. I pulled out every. single. photo. I resisted the digital switch for a long time so I had thousands of prints that were good ol' film.  I printed off post-its with dates ranging from 1980 to the present, cleared off the dining room table and began sorting. This took a long time. As I was sorting through my entire life and reminiscing I came across a few things I had forgotten and lots of cherished memories. I also found that I had doubles and sometimes triples of a lot of things. Those got thrown out. (Incidentally you can not recycle photo paper. It kind of hurt my hippie sensibilities to throw out that much paper, but, means and ends and all of that) There were also A LOT of what we will call "not keepers" from back in the film days. Out of focus, or left me saying "What the heck is that?" Also went to the trash. I tossed almost all of the prints that had been taken with a digital camera because they were mostly one or two photos out of sequence that didn't go in the scrapbook or with anything else. There we a few sticky points (how many pictures of the mountains do you need no matter how beautiful they are?) but in the end I ended up getting rid of well over 2,500 prints.
The rest I bundled into years and took them to F32 Photo to have them digitized. There are on-line services that do this as well but I chose F32 because it's local. I didn't really want to send all of my precious photos to Bangalore, thanks. Yes, it was expensive, but I think well worth it. It's saving me a ton of space in my house and preserved my photos at the same time. Prints don't last forever after all.
So I got rid of all of these (plus some more),

 

And now have just one box of photos and a disk. I  decided not to throw away all of my prints even though they are digital now. There is something to be said for the textile sensation of a photograph, especially one of good memories. I did however put them in one box, labeled and stacked by year.

Paper Towl(less)

Paper towels were something I had never even thought of until recently. They are such a staple of American life that they are practically and after though. You always know they are so wasteful but, I mean, who doesn't have paper towels? Me, that's who. I looked on Etsy for the cloth paper towels and found some. They were very cute and pretty expensive for something that's going to be used to clean up mashed banana and the macaroni my daughter threw against the wall. Plus they have to be snapped back together and put back on the roll which takes time. I'm not really looking to invest a lot of time in my non-paper towel maintenance. Instead I went out at back to school time and bought a whole bunch of cheap white dorm style wash clothes and now we use those instead. Easy peasy. Less waste, more efficient.

I had a little problem with mildew at first because I was throwing all of our rags in a dedicates bag for later washing but I found that if I lay the wet rags on the counter and let them dry it's not a problem. They are better for cleaning up most messes anyway. They were so cheap I don't feel too bad about throwing one away if it gets too gross but that takes a while. I also have some colored ones that I use specifically for the bathroom, and some softer ones that I use specifically for post baby meal clean up (you know, on day's when I don't have to just throw her in the bathtub) So there you go, paperless towels.


In the interest of full disclosure, I still do keep a roll of paper towels around. We have an 19 year old cat and some messes are just too gross to clean up with something you are going to keep. That's really the only thing we use them for anymore though.

The Big White Dress

My Wedding Dress. How many hours picking it out? Getting it altered? Shedding my own blood at a fitting. (No really, there was in incident with an oddly sharp shoe heel) The big day comes, it literally takes 5 people to put you in your gown, you wear it, you look FABULOUS. Then the wedding is over, you live happily ever after and the much beloved dress goes in a bag or a box in your closet never to be seen again.

Mine has been residing in a big white bag for about 5½ years now and taking up a lot of closet space. I have looked at it precisely zero times since my wedding. Still, it's a sticky wicket. It represents one of the biggest days of your life. I had to mull this one over for a long time. Let's get real here, my daughter is not going to wear my wedding dress, she's just not. I'm never going to wear it again. Having it hanging in my closet does not represent or cement my marriage. It's taking up a lot of space. I have no use for it and someone else could wear it. I finally decided to donate it, but I didn't just want it to go any old place, I wasn't just going to drop it by the goodwill. I found two worthy causes that take wedding dresses. Brides Against Breast Cancer and Brides for a Cause. I decided on Brides for a Cause for a couple of reasons. BABC is the more popular choice, and they state on their website that they have an over abundance of gowns. They are actually turning away older style gowns because they have so many. I'm sure they are a great organization but Brides for a Cause just seemed a little better to me. They are partnered with​ Wish Upon A Wedding, a non profit organization dedicated to providing weddings and vow renewals for couples facing terminal illness and serious life-altering circumstances.​  Breast Cancer is horrible of course but it also gets a lot of hype. There is no shortage of support for breast cancer research. I mean, you can buy everything from t-shirts to stand mixers in pink to support breast cancer. I wanted to donate my dress to someone who may have a less well know and less supported illness. 

I packed up my dress and wedding shoes (which no longer fit thanks to the joys of motherhood) and shipped them off. I will never know the fate of my wedding dress but I hope that it will bring someone else as much joy and happiness as it brought me. Hopefully it can help give someone deserving their dream wedding.

TV Baby steps

What an sneaky evil little contraption the television is. You spend all this time and energy picking out just the right one, best picture quality, surround sound, big enough to broadcast scores at Yankee stadium, and then you spend all of your time watching it. You don't even notice the time passing. So basically its a giant time sucking distraction from real life, which of course is what we love about it. I'm a TV junkie, I'll be the first to admit it. We don't actually have a giant mega TV, but we do have a fairly large flat screen in the living room and we still have my old 13 inch purple polka dot CRT model from college in the bed room (hand painted by me). I guess we have never been as TV obsessed as a lot of the nation. Still, until recently the TV has been on from waking until sleep in our house. When we started looking at and striving for simple living this jumped out at us as a big big problem. We were two and a half people with with four TVs. Too much, too many. Still, we are not quite ready to give up television all together, so what to do?
First off, we easily and without hesitation got rid of the TVs in the kitchen and office. It's been about four months now and I don't miss them at all. Then, with quite a lot of hesitation, we TV addicts decided to get rid of cable, which surprisingly (to me at least) we don't miss either. We pay for Netflix and HuluPlus and that is more than enough entertainment. We were already also paying for Amazon prime for diapers and such so they have movies too. We also got a nifty little thing called a Roku that allows us to stream all of these plus Pandora (which I am coming to love) on our remaining TV.

Several added bonuses to this system, the box is only about two square inches so we got rid of the giant cable box as well,, almost no commercials, and we are saving about $60 a month. So, we still have TV but at least now we have to think about what we are watching and if the show goes off and no one is paying attention the screen just goes black. I suppose eventually we should get rid of the TV all together but this will do for now. Baby steps my friends, baby steps.

Simple Beginnings

Simply stated, this is the story of my awakening.  Literally. One day, about 8 months after the birth of my daughter,  I woke up and wanted to change my whole life. I looked around my house and realized I was surrounded by things I didn't need or even want in some cases. Things that were taking up my time and attention. Physical stuff that was (and is) distracting me and drawing me away from what is really important in my life.  I realized I have been chasing the "American Dream" without stopping to think what it really was, what it's implications would be for me and for others.
We are a very average American family. College sweethearts, married 5 years, one beautiful baby girl, Dad's a graphic designer, stay at home mom, all in one modestly sized two story house. Until recently we were also a very typical American family, mindlessly acquiring more stuff that we thought would make our lives better. A new TV, an electric tea kettle, those shirts at Target that were just too good a bargain to pass up. We never stopped to ask ourselves why. What are these objects adding to our lives? What are they taking away?
Then of course there is the constant barrage of toys and clothes that comes with having a new baby. People cannot wait to fill your house with adorable (but essentially useless for someone who wears more food than she eats) clothing  and brightly colored, popping, whirring, singing plastic toys from China. And the blankets, my stars, the blankets, some of them very lovely and hand made that you feel obligated to keep, even thoguh you can't quite remember who gave them to you. (Was it your mother-in-law's co-worker that you met that one time?)
In other words, our house had become a place more for our stuff than for us.

So we decided to change that. One day I started cleaning out closets and the next think you know my den looks like this.
All of this stuff is gone out of my house now (except the table and two of the chairs). Mostly given to the local homeless shelter. Some of the less helpful items gone to Goodwill. That's at least half of our clothes, a few of our dining room chairs, a bookcase, three or four boxes of baby stuff and lots of other things. You know what? I don't miss any of it. I can't even remember what most of it was.  A funny thing happened. After I got all of this useless stuff out of my house I felt lighter, freer somehow. I wanted to get rid of more.

So that's where I am now. At the beginning of the journey toward simplicity. Some of it has been easy, some of it will be more difficult. This is not just decluttering my house, it's decluttering my mind and focusing on what is truly important to me.