Archives for January 2015

My Life in Photos

January 21, 2015 By amusingmjblog 1 Comment

Update: I had a couple of questions about how the books turned out, so I’ve added a photo of those to the bottom of the post!

I have this weird quirk (okay I have a lot of them, but let’s just talk about one today). I have always had this irrational fear of losing all my photos. I love looking through old photos, watching slideshows, old scrapbooks, etc. And for some reason I have always had a fear of losing them all in a tornado, flood or some other force of destruction. This paranoia led me to a project that was only possible due to my single years living in an apartment by myself with not a whole lot to do in my free time. I decided to go through my parents rubbermaid boxes full of photos of my childhood, organize and scan them all (or all the ones with people in them… no one needs the 4 rolls of scenery photos from the Grand Canyon, thank you twin brother) and put them on external hard drives for Christmas for my family. It was the perfect project: it meant that several people had copies and they all lived in different states plus it was a pretty special gift to be able to see pictures we hadn’t seen in years!

Sidenote: not too long later mom found a few more rubbermaid boxes with more pictures, so it turns out I only scanned about half, but still… it was a good representation of childhood. 🙂

But when this all happened I took the opportunity to sort through my digital files as well. I’d had a digital camera for about 4 or 5 years at this point, so I was beginning to accumulate quite a few digital photos! (Fortunately for me, it was before the iPhone and I didn’t have any pictures from my every day life to sort). But I spent a little time here and a little time there and finally had all the photos on my computer sorted into categories.

The good news is that this process really made it so that with the plethora of digital photos I take now (blog photos, life, iPhone, etc) I have a system for organizing them. And because nothing beats being able to flip through and look at pictures, I have a system that works pretty well for me to print pictures and keep up with my digital life.

I thought in light of it being January and most people are in an organizing/cleaning/purging phase I would show you guys my system (since the only organizing I’m doing around my house right now is taking things out of boxes and putting them where they belong). And yes, I am totally aware that some of this borders on the obsessive, but just go with me here.

Okay so first of all, I have all of my historical photos backed up on Dropbox (I pay for a subscription, but if you have less than 2 GB you can use it for free) and I also have them on an external hard drive that I keep at the office… just to have backups for my backups :). I like Dropbox because it acts like a folder on my computer making it easy to move folders and view what is in there. It also is easy to share folders with family and friends, since I am regularly the only one taking photos in my family! Most of my historical photos I have grouped into categories like family, Weddings, Vacations, etc because I have a hard time remembering what years things happened in.

Then on my computer I have things broken down into years as well as some other frequently accessed folders or things I want to keep on my phone. I have my iPhone sync with several of my folders including the ‘slideshow’ folder I have below that has a random selection of photos from my childhood or funny pictures I may want to access on my phone.

Then within my 2014 folder I create more folders for each different subject/event. Whenever I import photos from my camera or iPhone (which I try to do periodically… my iCloud is not reliable on getting all my pictures transferred… so I go through Windows import whenever I back up my phone) I try to move them immediately into folders where they belong, although since my life isn’t QUITE that organized, I know that if I have a folder with the date as its name that those photos need to be sorted.

Where you see the “Best of…” folders above is where I have been at an event and taken TONS of photos that I want to keep, but I also want just a few that are really the best pictures from the event. Sometimes these are edited, sometimes not, but these are usually the ones I share with friends and family so they don’t have to sort through all 400 pictures to find the 30 halfway decent ones. Periodically through the year I make sure that all my folders are copied to Dropbox and since I can access Dropbox from my phone, I can quickly send a link or email a picture to someone wherever I am!

Then my big project that I do ever spring is to make a MyPublisher book with all of the pictures. I have had good experience with MyPublisher for making photo books. I’m sure there are ones that are as good or even better, but since I’m now about 4 years into printing these (and they are all uniform… and match the guest book from our wedding) I’m probably going to stick with them. They usually have a few good discounts in January, so I usually wait until they have one for 60% off or free pages and then print the book.

I don’t do anything fancy like write words or descriptions for everything, I just go through my 2014 folder, pick out the pictures I want printed, then tell it to sort by time. Sometimes I’ll swap out which pictures are big and small, but the whole process takes me about an hour or two to go through. I love flipping through the last few years of photos and we keep the photobooks out in our living room for guests to look through if they are so inclined! The whole process now is pretty effortless and I always know where my pictures are, or can find them easily! I’m hoping this all helps me out when I have this little kiddo and the inevitable onslaught of photos that is sure to ensue.

Filed Under: Life, Organizing

Week 16 Bump Update

January 20, 2015 By amusingmjblog 1 Comment

Week 16 Recap

Baby’s Size: an iPhone… (its fruit/veggie size is a turnip, but since I can’t remember ever eating/seeing a turnip in real life… my iPhone feels much more realistic to me. Again… thanks to pregnant chicken for that reference)

Baby’s Progress: Baby’s skeleton is changing from cartilage to bone and can move it’s joints… and is growing. Baby can hear now, and that has made me think about all of the funny sounds I hear all day long: I wonder if he/she enjoyed the Stars game we went to with a group of friends… because I am sure it was loud enough to hear. But on a sweeter note it has made Reese and I more intentional about playing piano and guitar for baby. (Reese plays, not me… I can only play Oh When the Saints Go Marching In and I’m sure the baby doesn’t want to hear that on repeat).

Weight Gain: I’m still at 0 lbs. gained, again the doctor isn’t worried since she can tell the uterus is growing. And I’m sure at the end of my pregnancy these days of 0 weight gain will feel like a far distant memory. And clearly something is happening… I have a full on bump now.

Sleep: Sleeping is getting a little rougher, every now and then I have trouble sleeping, usually around 5 or 6am, which feels like it is just training me to be an early riser again.

Milestones: We had another doctor’s appointment this week, where we got to hear the heartbeat, and the doctor is saying after every strange and totally indistinguishable noise, oh well that is when the baby is moving, or that’s your placenta rubbing together, that’s your heartbeat, that’s the baby’s, and I’m hearing a whole lot of fuzzy noises. But I could actually tell the baby’s heartbeat, so that is fun. And we set a date for our next sonogram and we will get to find out the sex at that appointment, so YAY! Oh and we bought a new piece of furniture for the nursery! I’ll post about that later this week.

Favorite clothing item of the week: a long sleeve gap maternity T-shirt: cute and comfy! I received a bunch of maternity clothes from my BFF that she no longer needs, and this was in that stash.

Symptoms: My biggest symptom is that I burp all. the. time. It’s oh so very attractive. That and things seem to fall asleep faster: like my arms, hands, feet etc. So I can’t sit in the same cross legged position that I used to sit in, and I wake up and have to shake out my hands. My doctor said that could be a precursor to getting carpel tunnel later in the pregnancy which happens for some people. But since the solution to that is sleeping in wrist braces, I’m feeling like it would have to be pretty bad for me to think that was more comfortable. So I’m crossing my fingers (but not too tightly so they don’t go to sleep) that doesn’t actually manifest.

Workout: I worked out a couple of times last week, and spent Sunday afternoon raking leaves, so I’m putting a mark in the win column for last week!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

In Our Backyard

January 16, 2015 By amusingmjblog 1 Comment

So I haven’t really shown you guys pictures of the backyard of this house, and it is one of my favorite features of the house! Although moving into a house with a pool in December is torture… especially when we haven’t had weather above 35 degrees until this week. So every morning I sit and look out our back windows and think about how nice that pool will be to dip into when the Texas temps inevitably hover above 100 in late summer.

But since we have had a day or two now where it hasn’t been raining and standing outside for more than 5 minutes doesn’t feel insane, I finally went out and snapped a few photos for you guys.

We obviously haven’t set up our hammock yet, and we are in serious need of some quality outdoor furniture, but as I mentioned in this post, that is the gift my parents gave us for Christmas, so when it warms up a bit we will be purchasing a grown up table, chairs, umbrella and two lounge chairs for sitting poolside.

The picnic table you see just at the edge of the bottom of the picture below was one of the first projects the husband and I ever built. And you can tell. We didn’t know quite as much as we know now about securing things down, and some of the top boards come off when it is lifted, so it needs some rescue work if we are going to keep it… which we are still undecided on. But the movers basically wrapped it all in saran wrap (the moving version) and moved it over here, so for now we’ve left that on there until we decide what we are going to do with it.

This space is already pretty well landscaped and taken care of, so our long term plans other than adding furniture are minimal. We do plan on adding some better lighting out there (there is one VERY weak light), getting the already wired up sound system working (apparently we need another receiver or thingamajig or something), and maybe long term staining the fence. The fence is in pretty good shape, just looks a little rough.

As far as the plants, you know I love flowers, so I’ll be adding a few flowers around to add in some color, but mostly I’ll be waiting to see how everything looks in the spring and going from there.

Oh and as far as pool maintenance? We’ve hired someone! And in one week of coming the pool is already clearer and cleaner, so well worth it in my book. Plus Reese and I will be navigating learning how to take care of a newborn right around the peak time for pool care, so we decided having someone else responsible for this at least for the first year was worth being able to just jump right in when we are ready.

Now I am just watching the months tick by until I can dip my toes in the water!

Filed Under: Outside