Feline Friday: Snoop-ervisor Lily

 Lily has had a very busy week! She's the Project Snoop-ervisor for our kitchen update which just got underway.

First, I needed to empty all the kitchen cupboards. Lily assisted me at every turn. She especially enjoyed it when all the cabinets were empty and she could go right inside to take a look-see.

 

This particular cabinet was one she had never inspected before!

 From her high vantage point, Lily could tell me where I needed to do more cleaning!

It took several hours for the two of us to empty all the kitchen cupboards and wipe them down.

As you can see, she kept a close eye on me the entire time! 

Lily was alarmed to see how much stuff came out of those cabinets. MOM, do you have to put it ALL back?

 The next day, the crew arrived and began the prep work for this kitchen update. The cabinets, island, and trim will be painted. The walls will be painted later this summer, after we replace a few windows that have unfortunately passed the point of no return.

While the crew is working, Lily is confined to her upstairs "apartment" where she has all the comforts of home and room service several times a day. She seems quite happy there most of the time and it keeps her from being underfoot.

At the end of the first day of prep, Lily did a full kitchen inspection. She checked her beloved corner cupboard and assured me her secret passageway to Narnia was still intact.

After the second full day of prep, Lily took another stroll through the work site. Everything looked weird and sort of space age! She expressed alarm that the fridge which holds her tasty food was not at all in the right place. I assured her that it was still plugged in and would dispense her NOMS at the proper hour.

Stay tuned for another update from Lily, Project Snoop-ervisor Extraordinaire. The train has left the station, as they say, and there is no turning back!

Memory Keeping: Organizing Slides

 

Have you ever put off something because it just seeemed too daunting? That's how I've been feeling about my boxes and tubs of family slides. What's on all those slides? Do I really need them? It seemed easier to just leave them in the tubs!

But, as seems to be the case lately, one thing led to another. In working on my personal school years albums, I knew I'd have to dive into those slides to locate school-related images. There was no turning back!

First, some context (I'm always all about context):

When I was growing up, we took a lot of slide film, much more so than camera film. We had a projector and screen that I absolutely ADORED setting up in the basement. I "curated" slide shows for my parents, cousins, neighbor kids, or anyone else I could get to watch. Sometimes I even set up the record player so we'd have music to go along with the presentation and spice up my narration. As soon as we'd come home from a vacation, I'd start planning our slide show.

In those days, I'd organize the slides into circular trays then meticulously write a caption for each one on the lines provided on the sides of the box. I started doing this in elementary school and continued through high school. As you can see, I truly was born to be a memory keeper!

Fast forward to 2013: After my dad passed away and I had empty my parents' home to sell it, my first priority was to find all of the family photos and slides. Sure enough, the slides were just where I'd left them...but more had been added since I left home many moons ago -- boxes and boxes. Since I hadn't been there to organize them, they were in a big mess.

 I carefully emptied the slide trays from my childhood and kept the lists to go with each one. I packed everything in tubs and brought it home.

 

  

Several months ago I bought some packages of slide sleeves, knowing this was a project that I'd eventually have to tackle. I didn't know if I'd like them but I DID know that sleeves would surely be better than broken rubber bands! At least sets of slides could be kept together and safely preserved.

 

So here's the process I used to get this mess of slides under control: 

1) Physically organize the loose slides into archival sleeves, sorting by date/subject

2) Digitally organize and label the slides that have already been scanned

3) Decide which additional slides to have digitized and drop them off at a local shop

4) Print and add selective images to my scrapbooks

 

Physical slide organization:

The first step was to group sets of slides together so I could figure out what they were. Although slides are obviously cumbersome to work with (you can't see them without a light source), there are two things that make them a bit easier than photos: 

1) Unless they're in a plastic housing, most slides are numbered with an imprinted or stamped number
2) Most slides have a date on the cardboard -- this is the "developed on" date, NOT the "taken on" date but it's a whole lot better than no date at all!

I slogged my way through mixed up tubs and tiny boxes of slides, putting them back in their proper sets by date and then into numerical order. I grouped them temporarily with rubber bands just to keep them corralled. Trust me, don't use rubber bands for the long haul. They'll break and your slides will get all jumbled together. Slide sleeves are the way to go.

 As I worked on this project, I felt the joy of newfound "ORDER" washing over me!
 

Once a sleeve was filled, I could hold it up to a light source (I used a blank MS Word document on my desktop computer) to see 20 slides at once. This makes it easy to pull out any duds and see if they're slides I want to have scanned.

 

To look at the slides more closely, I am using a small handheld slide viewer. My parents had a larger one (WHY, OH WHY DIDN'T I KEEP IT?) but this one is getting the job done. We do have a slide projector but unfortunately the bulb was broken and will need to be replaced.

 

 Digital slide organization:

When I first brought all of our family slides home a few years ago, I took many batches in to be digitized.

When you have slides digitized, they'll come back to you in a jpeg format. My developer used a numbering system for each set of slides but I'd never spent time on labeling the files. This was my next task.

  I used a consistent format as much as possible, naming the folder with the date and subject (1975 California Trip), then each jpeg file with the labels I found on my slide list (1975 California Trip - Disneyland). I'm not ready to scrapbook those years yet but it's great to know that those images are digitized, findable, and ready to go.

 

  As it happens, I have a couple of my diaries from my childhood years (truly hilarious reading) and some entries correspond to family vacations. I have to give a shout-out to my nerdy childhood self for writing down everything we did and saw on some of those trips, because now I can identify the California "Trees of Mystery" and other points of interest along the way. It has been fun to read my diary and look at the slides! I'll be sure to include those diary entries when I eventually scrapbook those trips.😎

 

  Decide which slides to digitze:

Will I digitize each and every slide? NO! It's not cheap to have them digitized so I will be selective.

Will I print and scrapbook each and every slide? NO! To save space in my albums and save time, I'll probably make a lot of photo collages using the slides, adding digital labels to the photos as I go. It's quick and easy to print off an 8.5x11 collage and slip it into a sleeve for the scrapbook. Collages work great for making the best of "less than wonderful quality" images, too.

With all the slides in sleeves in a binder, temporarily labeled with sticky notes, I'll be able to go through them and decide which ones to have digitized. Since they're already in sleeves, I'll just take them to the scanning shop intact. This will ensure that they're scanned in the right order and placed in labeled folders. 

 

 

So circling back to what started all of this, one might ask: Did I find the school-related slides I knew must be hiding in those boxes? 

Yep, I did! First day of school pictures for several years, band, prom, homecoming, and much more. As soon as I get them digitized, I'll be able to print them and slip them into my school albums.

But all in all, there weren't a ton of school photos in our family's slides. What I did find was a host of precious images of camping trips, fishing adventures, vacations, birthday parties, pets, and so much more. In spending so much time with these images, I'm left with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude.

 

So yes, it's absolutely worth the time to tackle this daunting project. In retrospect, it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Now I feel SO MUCH BETTER about my slide situation!

And if my parents could see me STILL organizing slides, I know they'd be smiling! I haven't changed a bit. 😀

 

Feline Friday: Strike a Pose!

 Lily has recently returned to reclining on the back of our loveseat. For some reason, this location had fallen out of favor as a napping spot. Now this week, after many months, it's back in style.

As soon as I went over to take her picture, she struck a pose!

 Those feets!!!

  She has also taken to pressing her back feet against various walls whilst napping, as displayed below:

 

 

 As soon as she knows I see her, she strikes an extra cute pose!

Lily definitely knows how to work her angles!

Feline Friday: Butter Cam!

 Butter Cam ACTIVATED!

 Lily can detect butter, especially butter being slathered on warm toast, from most anywhere in the house. She knows her meowmy will always give her a tiny taste.

But her cat dad? Never.

Here she has her sights fixed on that warm, melty buttered toast. She gazes longingly but knows better than to get any closer than her meowmy's lap.

No worries, Lily. Meowmy won't let you go without!

Feline Friday: Temperature Control!

 Like all kitties, Lily is an expert napper. I've noticed over time that her napping patterns follow the sunlight streaming in the windows. She'll almost always seek out a nice patch of warm sun for her morning naps.

She'll usually start out completely in the sun but shift her position once she starts to get too hot. Here, the bottom half is still in the sun whilst the top half has moved to the shade.😀

After a certain amount of time doing "half and half", Lily is clearly WAY TOO HOT and moves under the shade of this bench where she can cool off for the remainder of her nap.

Just like humans will stick one foot out of the covers at night, Lily has clearly mastered the fine art of Temperature Control!

 

 

Feline Friday

Kindly excuse the delay in today's Feline Friday post! We are having some work done around our house and I got tied up (i.e., distracted) with the contractor. Exciting updates happening!

On that same subject, Lily has had to spend several days recently confined in a bedroom to keep her out of the way of the workers. Once she hung out in our master bathroom. When I came in to check on her, she was perched on the counter!

 

 Mainly she has spent her days in the guest bedroom where she has a pretty comfy setup: Plenty of blankies for her many naps, her own private "bathroom" (litterbox), and even room service! 

 

She seems to love having her meals brought upstairs, but she'd best not get used to it! LOL

 

Happy Feline Friday!

Feline Friday

 Lily had an appointment with her vet this week, the first time in several months! It was the first time that this vet had seen her since her anal gland surgery last July. He was very pleased with how she's doing!

 Lily was due for vaccines so that was the first order of business. In addition, she had a fluid-filled cyst on her chin which needed to be drained for the third or fourth time. He said that it's related to the recurring feline acne on her chin. To be sure, I need to pay more attention to the cleanliness of that area. In fact, when she was a young kitty, I was told to use Stridex pads on her chin. These days, I think I'll just use warm water. I'm taking no chances with her!

I also had the vet take a peek at her rear end because (warning, TMI ahead...) she occasionally has a little blood on the external area after going poop. I've had this problem looked at multiple times and her previous vet (recently retired) was not concerned. The vet she saw yesterday believes she has a build up of scar tissue which occasionally becomes inflamed. That makes sense given what I've observed, so I'm going to cross it off the list of things to be worried about.

Lily has to be sedated to go to the vet and this time when they brought her to the car, she was still asleep. Poor thing hates the vet so much that she was growling while sleeping! Turn the volume up to hear Angry Lily!

After coming home, it took Lily most of the day to feel better. She was obviously sore from her shots and chin procedure, plus she didn't care for the taste of the antiseptic solution they used on her chin. She licked her lips repeatedly (a sign of nausea). I made sure to mix lots of water into her food so she'd be well-hydrated, and by this morning she was back to her chipper self.

Sweet girl. As a senior kitty (age 15!), I'm so glad she had a good report from the vet!

Feline Friday: Up Where We DON'T Belong!

 Occasionally Texas Roadhouse (or just Roadhouse, as they apparently call it in Texas) drops of some of their delicious rolls at Spouse's office. Yesterday was once such fortuitous occasion. We enjoyed rolls for dinner and hid the rest away for safe keeping.

This morning Lily was in full Baked Goods Detector Mode. She knew there were rolls SOMEWHERE...but where? I saw her sniffing around the base of the counter, reaching upward on her tippy toes then suddenly...

UP SHE WENT! Remember that song from the old movie An Officer and a Gentleman? Instead, this was "Up Where We DON'T Belong"!

 

 Nope, not inside the paper towels!

 

She casually strolled around sniffing all the nooks and crannies for the delicious rolls.

Aha! I'm SURE there are rolls in dis microwave, mama!

Amazingly, she was RIGHT!

Happy Feline Friday, friends!

P.S. Lily DID manage to get a tiny taste of the special butter that came along with those delicious rolls! Thanks, Texas Roadhouse!

New Project: My School Albums

 Although I may not have blogged much about it lately, I have been doing a LOT of scrapbooking over the past year. I've worked on my chronological family albums (still not caught up but at least I'm withing striking distance of Bailey's college graduation) as well as my heritage albums.

With my heritage albums, I'm working my way from the oldest photos to the newest, and in that vein I am now at the point where I've scrapbooked my parents' wedding and early life. I'm almost ready to be born! hehe Working on my heritage albums has been the most interesting and rewarding scrapbooking I've ever done, hands down. I'm so happy to have completed many albums so far with more in the works.

 As if those two ongoing scrapbooking projects weren't QUITE enough, I was recently inspired to jump into another album project that's been on my list since I started working on the heritage albums: My own childhood and school years. Katie, a super talented gal who works at the store where I teach, recently shared her own boys' school albums and they were just so succinct and perfect that I felt inspired to make albums of my OWN school years.

As of this writing, I've worked my way from Kindergarten through Fourth Grade and let me tell you, I underestimated how fun and even cathartic this process would be. I've thought about why that may be and here's what I've landed on: I'm actually scrapbooking my OWN memories and activities. By contrast, the events I've included in my chronological albums are often my daughter's activities; for my heritage albums, many times I only have photos and basic information with no memories at all. So with this project, I have the chance to reflect back on my childhood years. It's gratifying to put my own photos, school papers, and memories together in one album -- instead of languishing in a box in the basement!

 I am so grateful to my mom who kept all of my school papers and photos -- and I DO mean all. But I wish we'd taken the time to date the papers and photos. I have consolidated my school papers into a couple of tubs but they are largely undated. Of course, I won't keep them all but the finicky side of me has to have some semblance of order before deciding which ones to discard.

 

I'm sure I'll end up with too many school papers to fit into the scrapbook itself, and many are oversized anyway. If I could pare it down to a smaller, organized box, I'd be happy with that.

Awhile back, I organized my school pictures in a small album with sleeves, so it's been easy to pull out a particular year of photos, pair them with the memorabilia for that year, and make a few pages.

 Here's a photo taken on the first day of Kindergarten. My mom saved the picture I'm holding, too.

She kept a small spiral-bound school album for about three years then gave it up. Inside the binder I found a few treasures for those years.

 

 For each grade, I'm making a 12x12 "cover" page with my school photo, grade, and dates. I'm also making a 12x12 facing pocket onto which I can adhere the class photo, teacher name, and anything else pertinent. The deep pocket is a great place to put those loose papers so they can be pulled out easily.

Mom even kept my nametag so I had to include it, too.

I have fairly detailed memories from my elementary school years so I'm planning to type them up and add them to each year. I even found my mom's old calendars and my diary from those years which is a great way to jog my memory!

 I recently made a Fourth Grade page about my childhood love of reading. I still have all the books I ordered through the Weekly Reader program, so I took pictures of them to include on a page. It's so much fun to think about what interested me back then. Truthfully, I'm pretty much exactly the same as I was in my childhood!

I'll be sure to share more photos as I go along but so far, this has been a thoroughly enjoyable project and one that I'll be really glad I took the time to put together. If you're thinking about starting your own school album, by all means DO IT!

Thanks for stopping by!