I'm in the middle of organizing several things at once because why would I make it easy and concentrate on a single thing at a time?
1. My photos on the computer! I don't know how many hundreds of thousands I have and everything is organized by month and year. I don't rename my photos as this would take me way more time than I have. I took 1,039 photos in Feb of this year alone now think back to 4 years of kids how many photos I have. I usually just upload/download (whatever it is called) several times throughout the month. I don't go through them and I don't print them (much to some people's disbelief). Think if I printed all my photos or even just the good ones? I started doing that when the kids were first born and trying to put them in albums . . . but after a few months I didn't have enough time to do that and the money that the photos cost would have been outrageous. I used to print photos out for other people too but that began to add up and if other people are like me when someone gives you their copies they just end up being tossed in a pile. Instead I try to "share" photos online through Walgreens that way family and friends can look through them and order what they want, if they want any at all. It doesn't cost me a thing.
At the moment my goal is to go through 2 months of photos each week and delete the bad, blurry, stupid, doubles, and keep the good ones. This week I did August and July of the current year and I deleted over 1000 photos. My computer is breathing a sigh of relief!
I do go through spurts of printing photos when they are on sale at Walgreens. Photos {I think!} I want to scrapbook but then this becomes a mess (see number 2). I plan to upload photos to my Walgreens account from each month just my favorites in case my computer decides to die or the house burns down. I also would like to buy an external hard drive to store my photos on but it's one of those things I think about but hate to spend that extra money and then will I be able to figure it out . . .
2. My printed photos. Oh my . . . this is out of control.
As I said I do go in spurts of printing photos that I intend to scrapbook. However if printing photos were instantaneous and I could reach out the window and get my printed photos and scrapbook them when I was excited, had an idea, had time, and wasn't exhausted then there would be no problem. However by the time I pick up the photos and get around to scrapping them then I can't remember the idea or why I even printed this photo or I can't find the photos I printed. Most of the time they get thrown in a pile and the pile grows and grows. Now I have several (hundreds) envelopes with a mixture of photos from 4 years in them. So I started to try to organize them this week. This is going to be a long drawn out process. Some photos I knew why I had printed them but others weren't obvious. I've also printed some photos more than once (like 3 times and I think I even have scrapped some of these duplicated photos already anyway!). I have (what I think) is a super fabulous idea for scrapping my printed photos once I get them organized.
Right now I have this box to store my photos and to me it makes no sense to organize them by date because I don't remember when anything happens and they are already that way on my computer -- so why do it twice? I really don't like the box (sorry, Cropper Hopper, it's big so where do you keep that out of sight but in an accessible place when I need to get to it). I know all you organized super neat freaks are thinking, what's the problem but since I am not an organized super neat freak that is the problem. This too will be an ongoing process that I will dread.
3. Cleaning out the closet from Hell upstairs. However once I dug through the heaping pile that was in the middle of the closet I found that the perimeter of the closet that I cleaned over 2 years ago was pretty much untouched and intact. This photo was from August 2006 (yes I have photos of my closets thus why I need to weed through my saved photos) but this is also how it looked when I removed the crap in the middle.
It was the last minute, where the hell do we put this before the birthday parties that made it look like a giant mess. I'm still working on this. This closet is in our bedroom so I only have about 45 minutes a day when the older kids are at school and Reese is awake and we have time to clean this. It's not so much fun with Reese though, she thinks it's a pretty cool place to hang out. If you look closely at these photos you will see a couple baskets, containers of printed photos -- these are in addition to that giant basket from number 2. I won't even talk about the other random boxes of baby and wedding photos we have.
4. Kids' clothes. How many times do I complain about kid clothes on this blog? Too many, every size and season change. I love fall but I hate the 90 degree day today and the 30 degree day tomorrow plus since it's monsoon season at my house I have no idea what to dress these kids in and believe it or not they all grew in height since last spring so pants are now too short but finally fit them in the waist so now we have to go to the bigger size which is long enough but won't stay up because these children are missing rear ends and are skinny as poles. So pretty much I have to have 2 seasons of clothes out until November. We don't have room for all these clothes out. I just got Reese's clothes out for the next size today so maybe tomorrow I will tackle the older kids. If I were to have children again, I think I would forgo all hand me downs and just go out and buy 5-7 mix & match outfits so we didn't have so much but even that would cost me an arm and leg with 4 kids and I'd have to keep up on laundry a little better but we would have more closet space without all these tubs of clothes waiting for us.
No wonder I always feel unorganized and overwhelmed all 4 of these projects are time-consuming and involve a lot of STUFF and yes, if I were to do one at a time maybe it would easier . . . but I'm not for the easy way out of anything!
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