hmatt's blog

Well, that was quite the visit home.

Earlier this year my grandmother’s house caught fire. All their remaining stuff was sent away to get cleaned and boxed up. The day after I went up there was the second day they’d been in their new house. Wow. It was surreal. From the outside it looked the same, but all the rooms were completely different, and the only thing that looked remotely the same was the whitewashed basement. Wow. Crazy man.

Anyway, I spent a lot of the time helping them get everything back in order as soon as possible. I took all their ‘too sort’ stuff and put it below. Things like books, cook books, papers, photos and VHS tapes. That stuff I want to go through at some point because there are several home movies that I want to convert.

As for photos I had this plan. I wanted to show my grandpa how to scan each photo. Then I saw how many, many, many photos there were so I looked up a service to scan them for us.

Fortunately many exist, and I went with Scanmyphotos.com – I bought three boxes for $250 which will get me 3 dvds of scanned pics. That isn’t counting the ones that are still in albums that I need to take apart.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I’m probably the only one in our family willing to do all this work. However, there are no ‘backups’ of those memories and I want to make something that will allow all those pictures to be preserved.

I didn’t want to get these scanned pics (at 300 dpi) mixed with everything else, so I had signed my grandpa up for a flickr account. This way I’ll have a backup, with tags of us all. Hooray!

It will take me years to complete though. This first phase was all the loose photos, and next time I visit will be to take apart the albums.

The rest of my trip was trying to reduce the amount of junk that has accumulated at my parent’s place. I’m part of the problem there as I have 30 plastic bins with books, toys, memorabilia, tshirts and papers. Ugh. Such an overwhelming task.

Now that I’m back at my place I’ve been all inspired to clean up my place. I am starting to accumulate all sorts of paper trash that I hope a NeatReciepts scanner will fix.
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My grandmother was in the hospital for surgery to get a metal rod in her leg so she could walk around (she has cancer in her leg). The last time I saw her was in bed waiting to go in.

I’m so grateful that my grandmother was able to be such a big part of my life when I was younger. I was lucky to have such a wonderful childhood.
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Okay. Time to clean up some of this mess at my place now.