Life continues apace with our non-stop selling of furniture and household goods and with our multiple projects of digitizing everything possible in our lives. Last November I wrote about how our house was beginning to echo, but that was small peanuts compared to now. The house is now so empty that we can’t speak in regular voices inside the house; we have to deliberately lower the volume. Chelsea calls the new voice levels our “empty” inside voices, as in “use your empty inside voice, Mom!”
Selling all our furniture and household goods
In recent months we’ve decimated our personal goods – we’ve sold wardrobes, lamps, a bed, side tables, power tools, weight benches and weights, two generators (for hurricanes), hefty generator cords, a powered USB hub, life jackets, clothing, laundry hampers, yard and garden tools, dishes, all our bookshelves, and more, more, more.
We’ve gotten so good at FreeCycle and Craigslist and garage sales (with a bit of eBay thrown in) that we could write our own “Downsizing for Dummies” series.
The hardest was watching our beautiful flat screen Sony Trinitron television walk out the door, along with our year-old DVD player and my much loved sound system (a gift from Alex one year). We love movies – they provide a great relief from our long days.
No more big screen for us now…if we want to watch a movie we take my computer speakers and my 20” computer monitor out to the table in the front room where we keep a spare set of cables. We hook everything up and use my laptop for our movie player.
Another major and emotional event was selling our Hot Springs hot tub two weeks ago. We have dearly, dearly loved the relaxation and well-being that soaking in the hot tub has brought us over the years, never mind the great bird-watching, long talks as we soak away our stress, and fun of watching sunset and sunrise from the comfort of the hot tub.
We blinked back tears as the new owners carted it away, reminding ourselves once again that we are undertaking a monumental voyage of adventure and discovery. What’s a hot tub compared to a lifetime’s worth of new memories and adventures?
Photo scanning project
Ahhhh…this project started out so innocently. We were short on funds to buy Alex a great gift for his birthday last year, so we thought long and hard about what we could make or do for him.
We’d been sorting through our photos from our memory boxes, starting to assess the size of our photo scanning project and trying to figure out how to actually do it when I came up with the idea of doing a slideshow for Alex, showcasing his life in photos.
Great idea, right? Who wouldn’t love a personalized slideshow of his life, showing the few hundred best and most captivating photos? We figured it’d take a few weeks to get it all done. Plenty of time before his November tenth birthday.
That was early October. Nearly four months later, in late January, Alex finally got his “birthday present” – a slideshow of two hundred photos, covering his life from birth to present time, set to a soundtrack we created for him.
What a four months that was. We sorted boxes and sorted photos for hours. I scoured the web for scanners, reading reviews till I was cross-eyed. I found one that looked incredible; Chelsea happened to mention it to her dad, who came through in spades. Before she knew it, her dad had ordered the scanner for her and had it fast-shipped to our house.
Chelsea settled in to a full-time job of scanning photos. I started going through the photos already in our computers, thousands of them, choosing the best of the best of Alex. I kept going with other projects as well, but stayed focused on finding photos of Alex and hunting for the perfect songs in our collection of thousands.
In the beginning stages of the scanning project Chelsea focused on the photos of Alex. As she finished, I took the photos and worked them into the album I was creating, ending with the top three hundred photos. Meanwhile I was spending hours online, listening to clips of songs, looking for song lists on “friends” and “love” and “children” while Chelsea continued scanning the rest of our photos.
Needing to keep the slideshow to ten minutes, I whittled the photos again, this time down to two hundred, and then enlisted Tyler’s help (our roommate) in putting the songs together in a sound track.
By the time we sat Alex down for his viewing of our slideshow Chelsea had scanned over four thousand photos, I had whittled over ten thousand photos down to the top two hundred of Alex, and I’d spent well over one hundred hours searching for the perfect songs to put together in a sound track, not counting the time with Tyler.
Final result? It’s an awesome slideshow. Awesome. Just ask Alex.
I want to post it on YouTube, but I need to find a movie-making software that will let me pause for a minute or so on the last photo instead of rolling immediately to a black screen and the credits. It was enough back in January to get it as far as I did, and we wanted to get on with the rest of our projects, so it’s on the back burner for now.
It’ll move to the front as soon as I do slideshows for Paul and Chelsea. I’m doing them before we leave. It’s a gift of love to my three much-loved children, who are the best gifts I have ever received in my life.