Those of you who follow my blog may have noticed I haven't been posting very much. My spouse fell and fractured the top of his left femur at the end of 2022, and underwent a partial hip replacement. That was followed by a number of complications - three dislocations in the first seven weeks, revision surgery, and ten weeks after that in a brace, then lots of physical therapy - interspersed with flare-ups of a couple other health issues. There were eight emergency room visits and five hospitalizations totalling fifteen days, from the end of December through the end of March.
Therefore, the first four months of the year, we were pretty much stuck at home, followed by a few more months where numerous appointments made it hard to go anywhere else. Now we're in the brutal heat of a record summer, and I don't *want* to go anywhere else - just stay inside my nice cool house.
So what have I been doing to keep busy?
When my parents passed away in 2017, I wound up with all the photos they still had - old family pictures and travel snapshots. My 93-year-old aunt recently passed all her photos on to me as well. I had a box full of snapshots of my husband - an oldest child whose father had easy access to film processing, so there were LOTS of them. And I had my own personal photo albums.
I worked on the snapshots of my husband first, and then halfway through April, started on a set of my photo albums, which cover mid-1986 (I'd already organized photos prior to that time) through 2005 (when I moved from Washington state back to Texas, and got my first digital camera).
I decided to go through all the pictures, get rid of ones that were out of focus, or were places or landscapes (or people) I couldn't identify, and then give most of the remaining "good" photos to the offspring (especially photos *of* the offspring). Most importantly, I wanted to label the back of every single photo.
I used
Stabilo aquarellable pencils to write on the backs of the photos. I wrote who was in the photo (full names including maiden names), and when and where it was taken. I also made a note, if there was more than one copy of an image, who had other copies. This will help the offspring later on when disassembling my albums, to know who already has the images.
I've also done some other interesting things in this project. I've used my Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner to scan color negatives, so I can blow them up to make out details not visible on the prints. That's actually not the case for the photo below - it just happened to be on a strip with another negative I needed to enlarge, and it's a picture of me having fun that I really like.
Above: Amanda Pape on a hike with the offspring on the Rainier View Trail #1155, off the Corral Pass trailhead, partly in the Norse Peak Wilderness in the Mt. Baker - Snoqualmie National Forest, September 11 or 12, 1999. [This is what I wrote on the back of the photograph with a Stabilo aquarellable pencil.] Photo by the offspring.
Below: Red, black, and navy blue Stabilo aquarellable pencils sitting on top of a page in a Pioneer X-Pando post style, patented bi-directional slip-in pocket memo photo album (Style No. BP-200) I bought years ago. The photo at the bottom is of my son's sixth grade class in June 1998. Photo by Cathy Wilterding.
Believe it or not, I saved a bunch of calendars (mostly pocket, but one wall) from 1991 through 2000 that have helped me put exact dates on many photos. I also found old Christmas newsletters and copies of a few other e-mails I'd sent to be helpful on determining times and places. And interestingly enough, envelopes holding the negatives often have notes on when and where photos were taken - that's what helped me figure out the photo at the beginning of this post was from the Rainier View Trail #1155.
After I took the photos and had the film processed, I had slipped the photos into the albums in (more-or-less) chronological order, but in most cases I had not written down any details on the photos, either on the backs, on a sticky note, or in the memo field of the album. Just as well on the latter, since I'm getting rid of so many photos (either by tossing them or by passing them on to the offspring). All photos will have information safely written on the backs.
I've also scanned some photos in order to upload them to Google Images for a search. For example, I did these two photos - which actually aren't from my albums, but rather from my parents' travels. All they said on the back was "Albuquerque." Read the captions to find out what they actually are, thanks to Google Images. This didn't work for every image I wanted to identify, but it worked for many. I may hang on to some photos I really want to identify for a bit longer, and try running them through Google Images again in the future.
Above: San Agustin De Isleta church at the Isleta Pueblo, 15 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photo taken by one of my parents.
The photo below was one from my albums, from the summer of 1998. I knew it was from a park somewhere in the Seattle, Washington, metropolitan area, but I couldn't remember which one. Even though this structure was torn down in 2015, Google Images found a match when I uploaded it (see the caption).
Above: The offspring in the upper play area of the silo restroom building at Farrel-McWhirter Park in Redmond, Washington, summer 1998.
Below: Texas state highway maps with the routes of vacations in March 1995 (top) and summer 1997 (bottom) highlighted.
Finally, my albums include a lot of ephemera, such as postcards, brochures, and in some cases, maps. I had used big folding paper Texas state highway maps on many trips (long before GPS systems were available), and plotted our routes when we got home. I scanned a few of those (above) to have copies for the offspring.
As I write this, I am finishing up with 1999 - just six more years (2000 through 2005) to go. Good thing, as I want to deliver the offspring's photos this autumn. I got 14 years worth of albums sorted in about three months, so I figure I can do six years in the remainder of this hot summer.
© Amanda Pape - 2023 -
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