In the continuing saga of the many family pictures, I have struggled through 2005 and have now entered the year 2006 and have taken a break. I think we have way too many pictures. Years from now, will anyone care to look at several pictures of the same person from different angles? Do I, now, care to look at pictures of scenery? By and large, the answer is no. When you are actually visiting a place, you somehow think that you can capture the beauty or grandeur of the place in a photograph, but you can't. It is only a rare photo that evokes the same emotions of actually being someplace. So, as the result of this carefully thought out philosophy, I don't take many pictures of just scenery. I want someone, hopefully someone recognizable, to be in the picture. People pictures are more interesting to me, again, pictures of people who I know so that they have some meaning.
We have too many pictures. We have a walk-in closet in our house in which I installed steel shelving on both sides to hold pictures. Anne's father was a serious amateur photographer, took thousands of slides, made his own pictures from negatives and kept a photographic history of his family. I have many pictures from when I was growing up too. We have many pictures of our family as it grew, matured and multiplied, many before the advent of the digital camera. The idea was that Anne would digitize all of her father's old photographs and slides and have copies for her brothers and sister. That's a nice idea, but it is somewhat overwhelming to actually scan thousands of slides and photos. Well, we'll see.
READING LIST
I like to read, but, in the past, I have found that I didn't have much time to do that. Now that I'm retired, I think I have some more time, although the time seems to be fleeting even now. I recently read some James Joyce: The Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Chamber Music. Now I have taken up Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier, which is a gothic tale and one ideal for a winter's night with the wind blowing and snow or rain swirling outside. I think I read this before, but, so far, I don't remember much of it. That's one advantage of getting more mature and getting oldtimer's disease. You only have to have a very few books, because as soon as you read one, you forget what you read and can then read the story anew. This story is well written and draws the reader into it from the very first. What will happen to the young girl who, on the death of her mother, has gone to stay with her aunt and creepy uncle who is the landlord of the Jamaica Inn where guests no longer stay, but people come and go and there is a brisk tavern business, on the foreboding Bodmin Moor.
I thought that renewing my blog postings would act as a sort of journal for me and for anyone of my friends or family who cares to stop on by here, but I realize that there is no index for it, so how do I find anything I wrote in the past. I suppose I should be assigning descriptive words somewhere, but I haven't. I also find that I don't read older posts that I have made, so I am sometimes unsure if I already said something. What to do? Do I try to go back and see if I did, or just write about it all over again? Well, dear reader, consider that, like reading, writing is a new experience for me each time.
The heading "Reading List" might be misleading since I haven't given a list or anything, but the idea is that I should probably write a precis [that's a word that hasn't come to mind for a while] of the story. At least I would then know if I had read it and what it is about, in case I want to read it again voluntarily. Maybe someone else who is a reader of this blog might also benefit from such a thing. The seed has been planted and we will now have to stay tuned to see if I do that.
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