One of my goals going forward is to take more video of our lives. When I spent a whole days going through photo books from my mom’s flooded house, I was surprised to see how much the photos shifted in quality. The older photos were actually better. Brownie photos from the fifties and sixties had better color with sharper focus. The seventies were generally out of focus and sepia-brown. This might have been a byproduct of the cellophane photo books my mom used, but the clarity of the pre-seventies never returned.
All these weird posts showing up in the feed are part of a project I’m working on to organize all my various projects into a single part of the site. It’s also incorporating updates to Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads. I would include Facebook but it’s not as easy to auto-post to a personal Facebook page and I haven’t had time to set that up.
For now, I’m focused on actually making the parts of the site, not futzing with automations that may or may not work. I want to make it relatively easy to capture this stuff in one place, and I’m doing it on the website since I can keep it all in one place, and update it from anywhere.
This is tied to the whole process of organizing my mom’s stuff this year, and beyond that, my stuff, but that’s going to be explained in a later post once I have it figured out for myself.
A big part of this was spending 8 hours one Sunday emptying family photo books to make the photos easier to scan and store… only to wonder who would ultimately care and what was the point. I do think there’s a point, but it’s easier to find when things are organized.
Thanks for humoring me as I figure this stuff out. It will relate to my other work, I promise.
I realized recently that I spend a lot of time futzing with gadgets and making aspirational purchases with the idea that I’m going to get to something in the future. My gadget inventory is proof that I probably also enjoy owning retro tech that was out of reach in the past.
Still, I would like to make things, not collect things. As I look at paring down the stuff I have, I want to link the remaining stuff to some sort of desired outcome, i.e. I want to finish more novels and short stories, and I want to take more photos and make more videos.
So I’ve been thinking of all this in terms of workflows. What gear, time and process lead me to accomplish my goals?
First I’ll list the workflows I’m thinking of, and then I’ll build them out so the stuff I have is accomplishing a purpose and not just taking up storage.
From March to May of 2024, I built my mom a cottage with bathroom in our backyard, added a patio, and still need to finish the detail work. This page documents the project.
