Another Version of What To Do When It's Below Freezing

Or, Ghosts of Christmasses Past

Once the huge Thanksgiving project was over, I felt a serious sense of anticlimax. We weren't going to have much of a winter holiday bustle; we shop for family gifts all year long, stockpile them in the office closet, so there wasn't much shopping to do, no trips to plan, and we wouldn't know if we were having any visitors until we saw the whites of their eyes. I had a few final classes between Thanksgiving and the end of the semester, so even that wasn't much of an occupation. Thus, a quandry: what to do with the long cold hours I can no longer spend outside gardening?

Fortunately I came across a pile of photo CDs when I was cleaning out a box of office stuff moved here from Delaware - and a new obsession was born. I spent many hours between Thanksgiving and Christmas transferring photos from the CDs onto my computer (they had been on an older computer, the laptop that was stolen soon after we moved to New Mexico) and then onto my photo storage/sharing site on Flickr. I think I finally have all of them on Flickr now, though I may find a few hanging around and take care of them later. It has been a wonderful trip through past happy times with friends and family, causing feelings of both joy and sorrow. I've put a link to my Flickr photos in the sidebar here, and would love to have visitors share them.

At the same time I was doing this, we were also working with paper photos from other unpacked boxes moved here three-and-a-half years ago, sorting them, copying some of them, then framing them to hang on walls, stand on shelves, in general have our faraway (in so many ways) family members close to us. It was quite strange living here for these years without photos in our living space, and what we have done to remedy this feels very very good.