My first camera and tears of joy.

It started with putting away the Christmas decorations, followed with a full blown organizing frenzy and ending with a huge realization.  I'd forgotten that I’d signed up for Apartment Therapy’s The Cure.  “The perfect excuse to kickstart the process of getting our home (and, at the risk of sounding overly dramatic, our lives) back in order.”  (When the heck did I sign up for that?? AND why???)

The first assignment was in my email box early January 1.  Loved the first part: reward yourself with flowers, houseplant or a bowl of fresh fruit.  Easy Peasy.  A friend had given me a small olive tree a couple of months ago and I hadn’t potted it yet.  Out I went, potted it up, put it in a basket and felt super accomplished.

But there I walked back in the house to all the Christmas decorations and the hardest part of assignment—clean ALL the floors.  I boxed up all the decorations, got them in position to go into the attic and hit not only the floors, but the baseboards too (!) of the bottom level of the house.  Heading upstairs, my husband opened the attic.  And there's where things took a left turn.

I have to tell this part of the story so you'll know why I spent the next several hours sitting in the attic.  A couple of months ago, I wanted to find a video project I did in college.  I’d searched everywhere I could think of in the actual house and still hadn’t found it.  It was on VHS and I wanted to have it copied to DVD so that I wouldn’t lose it to forward advancement in technology.  (Hmmmm.)  My husband thought perhaps it might be in one of the boxes in the attic.  (I hoped not, but was willing to take a look.)  We climbed up and spent the next several hours going through the boxes.  (In the end, I found it along side the other VHS tapes in the media center, happily NOT in the attic!!  However, Michael ended up bringing down several boxes of his work related stuff to purge—long forgotten and obviously not needed after 9 years in the attic!!

Going through his boxes, he pulled several brand new boxes of Microdisks that hold a whopping 1.44MB of data.  1.44Megabytes??  Whaaaat?!!!  AND we couldn't play them if we wanted to.  What if there were images on there??  I’d just held tangible pieces of my past in the form of photographs and albums (yes they were in the attic, but they are in AMAZINGLY good shape and now they're not!) and we had laughed and giggled at the memories.  

Today storage is ridiculously inexpensive and we can afford to keep the majority of our memories on 3TB disk drives or in the clouds somewhere.  But I encourage you to print those memories as you go along.  Put them on the wall, put them in an album.  Enjoy them, live with them, everyday.  You’ll be so glad you did.

I mean really, you'd want to miss out on something like THIS??