Flashback

Our computer in the study is over 8 years old.  It has grown extremely temperamental.  You can never be sure how long it's going to take for an application to open.  After threatening to buy a replacement since last Christmas, I finally broke down and bought a new laptop about 2 weeks ago.  When I told Hannah, she was so shocked to hear that I'd spent money on a new computer that she asked if I'd been promoted.  No, that wasn't it.  The real reason I finally made the purchase was that I was afraid to think of what Kim would do to punish me if our old machine broke.

Of course, I don't want to simply get rid of the old machine.  Jay can certainly make use of it.  He's become mildly addicted to Facebook.  Now that school's back in session, he needs a computer for homework.  So, I decided to try and clean up the machine so that it can still be used.

One of my first tasks was to remove all of our photos from the hard drive.  Every picture we've taken since 2006 was stored on the machine.  While we don't take too many pictures, we still had almost 2,000 of them sitting on the hard drive taking up space.  Since they weren't really stored in any particular order, I decided to organize all of them.  That meant that I needed to look at each one first.

Our pictures follow a pattern each year:

• The kids' birthday celebrations at the kitchen table
• Easter egg hunts
• Family vacations
• Summer trips to Fox Point with a host of people being pulled behind the boat
• The back-to-school photo of Jay and Nick (and sometimes Hannah) on the driveway before heading off to school
• Random photos of dogs (usually eating out of the dishwasher, hanging out in the lawn, or curled up with a kid on the floor)
• Jay and the neighbors in their Halloween costumes
• The family trip to the Christmas tree farm to cut down the tree
• Christmas morning.

Because our picture-taking follows such a consistent pattern, it was actually pretty easy to organize our photos.  Now they're safely off the hard drive and neatly stored on USB drives and CD's.

When I finished up the job, I felt pretty good about myself.  I'd freed up almost 4GB of space on the hard drive.  Jay was free to keep on giving status updates on his Facebook page.  And, I'd had a chance to relive the past 6 years -- focusing only the good parts.  That's definitely the way to do it.