Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I started organizing the chestful of pictures. Let’s get started!
But first, I have a new area in the house to call my lab — for now at least. We have a spare bedroom we call our art room and it has been recently made available for use. I’m working off the same folding table as before, but with the extra space –and the ability to close off the area from our four legged friends– there was enough room for my father and me to move the old sea chest from our garage to the art room.
The goal in this phase of this branch of the project is to get a general census of what we have so we know how much storage to buy. Color photos take three times the space as their Black and White or Sepia counterparts, and many pictures have their original negatives stored in there as well. The general guidelines I received was to sort everything into large, medium, and small piles, with separate piles for color images.
We opened the chest and started pulling out various prints. I about have no words for the level of entropy I found. Collections of photos were haphazardly strewn about inside, while other prints were floating free in the photo paper soup. As I excavated, I found where at least a few photo envelopes had lost at least partial containment while in at least one case, a small photo of a motorcycle frame found its way inside a package of my father’s school photos. If it were any more organized, sorting would have been trivial. If it were not at all organized, I could be a lot more mechanical. As it stands, I am choosing to preserve obvious collections and incorporate them into my eventual file system.
Not all collections are bound the same. The most secure collection is a cardboard box stuffed full of envelopes. I all but left that one alone, moving it into a plastic bin along with several other obvious sets. I also had a special place in that bin for less organized sets of photos, such as one series that only had a rubber band. Several loose sets of pictures were obviously taken together, especially if they were together in a stack. Those ended up in yet another folder.
I still ended up with a few surprises. I had to make a pile for non-picture documents and envelopes with their contents lost to the soup. A lot of old mail ended up in there. I even found a lock of hair, presumably from someone’s first haircut. There must be no fewer than four or five languages represented in there.
Eventually, I ended up taking a bunch of sandwich bags and stuffing the loose groups in. I actually found a small picture within a minute while writing this post — in part because of this very tactic.
I owe a big thank you to my father for sorting out ambiguous sets. A lot of the memories in the trunk are his or are from people I never overlapped with. I can see this project taking quite a while. Hopefully, things can get moving sooner rather than later.
Final Question: How do you bring order to semi-chaos?