Work in progress

I'm home again today. The infection has spread to my other eye, despite the fact that I've been dosing it along with the original. The first eye is much better... still totally red mind you, but the swelling is gone. The second is swollen enough to interfere with my vision again. Ugh - I thought this would be a 24 hour thing.

Anyway, onto something better.The kids having their birthdays has thrown me back into the scrapbooking foray lately. I've done a couple of pages for them about their parties and now I'm going through the past few months of photos to see if there is anything else I should be making pages out of. And the short answer is... maybe a couple... but overall, not really. Things have evolved over the past 5 years. Liam has giant, paper-based 12x12 books to document his babyhood. By the time Mal came along, I had gone digital, and she has 8x8 books, digitally done and printed as photos to slip into page protectors.Now, though, things are more about us as a family than they are about the kids individually. Not always, but mostly. Last year for family documentation I did Project 365, which is a photo a day with a bit of info scribbled on a card to go alongside. It was fun for a year but I didn't want to do it again. I felt it was limiting to be restricted to a single photo on some days, and to be forced into generating a photo on other days. It's also a big, giant 12x12 binder.
This year, again, I'm going with something new. This is an 8x10 book I am making using Blurb software (www.blurb.com). The software has tons of templates for different numbers of photos on each page, along with space for captioning the photos. It's keeping it really simple - photos + words - and doing away with the fun-but-time-consuming part of scrapbooking, the embellishment. For me, for right now, this works. It takes ten minutes a day to drag a few photos into a new template and write a bit about them (and I don't document every day; just those days when there is a good photo or something interesting to say). I've been keeping on top of it since the start of the year (and backing it up!) and am so far at about 70 pages. At this rate, a 200-page book by year's end will probably run me about $60.
I finally figured out how to do a screen capture on the Mac - that's what you see here - a few sample spreads from my book while I work on it (and if your eyesight is excellent, you can see all the pages lined up together underneath the full-size spreads). I am really stoked about this new way of documenting. It's quick and easy, looks great, and will easily fit onto my bookshelf. The only drawback I've found so far is the need to delay the gratification of having something tangible in hand until the end of the year. I'm not good with delayed gratification... we'll see if I can make it.