Monday Funday!

For pure entertainment:  Improv Everywhere Pure enjoyment for three minutes or for an hour!

For Christmas shopping:  Red Letter Words

For learning:   of course, something “fall-ish” to cook, and a blog to follow:  101 Cookbooks

For Photography:

(hers) StacyIdeusPhotography

(yours) Google’s Picasa

Besides that it’s totally free, my fav feature is that it can identify faces and group photos by who is in them.  So  cool.   While it’s still learning the faces of your family it lists those who look most like that person.  I loved this  because I never think I look like my kids–but Picasa did!  Yay!  Plus, you can make photo collages, it organizes beautifully, and dumbs down some common Photoshop features for people like me to use!  Check out these  screen grabs of my people albums:

For sharing my joy:

Ella (6) hosted a tea party for her little sister, Laynee (3) this morning.  It blessed my heart.

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Just download a blog reader and enter http://www.momjuice.wordpress.com as a subscription.  Soon, I may even have those handy buttons to click (if I figure it out, that is…)

I think I lost my memory.

I have been sad for a about a week.  Not sad like every second I’m sad; but sad like when you think about the sad thing, you get sad again…to the point of tears, even.

Somehow in this house of four toddlers, one of them managed to tug on the mouse of our computer which caused the whole thing to crash to the ground.  The computer is broken.  It won’t boot up.  My husband diagnosed the problem as the….(drum roll, please)…the HARD DRIVE.  Yes, the hard drive.  You know, the place where I’ve stored all my pictures and video for the last two years.

This is the reason I’m sad.  For some reason, I’m having trouble getting over the fact that all my memories are lost.  Apparently I put all my memories in the digital photography basket, ahem, hard drive.  That is what I’m really struggling with.  To the point of tears, as I already said (but saying it again somehow makes me feel like you GET that I’m really sad!).

Which brings me to where my thoughts have taken me…why do I feel like all my memories are in these pictures?  Maybe it’s because I don’t have any other record of our lives.  Maybe it’s because I’m afraid I won’t have anything tangible to show for the last two years of my children’s upbringing.  I won’t have any pictures to show them when they have children (especially the toddlers…most of their life in pictures is gone now).  What about when we’re old and our kids are gone?  There are two whole years GONE!  That was a lot of life to live!!  This is no small thing to me!!

But, then again, I was never before concerned about backing up all of these images and videos.  I wasn’t journalling (or even blogging) or scrapbooking.  I did have this great idea to save our calendars for reflection’s sake but the subsequent good idea was to photograph each month and then toss the paper.  Ug!

Not until all this was gone did I stop to think about that if I want something to show for these years I need be actively doing it.  And that begs the next question:  What would that even be?  Or even this question:  Is this even important?

I am actually wondering here if I have some kind of issue with hoarding in my life that points to a deeper emotional issue that needs to be dealt with.  (Let’s just say I haven’t ruled this out!) I do wonder if I have a mild case of the hoardings from time to time.  And is this even connected?    I don’t even know.

I just thought that if I wrote about this feeling, it may help me (or you) locate some revelation on the topic. Or, it may just be a reminder for me (maybe you, too)to back up the hard drive from time to time–I will when I get a new computer, that is.