Today's challenge...

Maureen posed this challenge over at 2P's:

If you keep your photos on your computer. How often do you put them on a disk to back them up?

Well, a few weeks ago I spent three days sorting, deleting, and burning photos. I hadn't done it since the previous December. I had 4500 pictures to go through. I have to mention here that I take pictures of almost anything and everything. If I see a neat thing shopping, I take a picture of it. If I see some inspiration, I take a picture of it. I didn't do a very good job of editing out the bad pictures during the course of the year so I had to do it at the end of the year before burning them to disk. I also take pictures in RAW format a lot and this requires editing before printing. However, I discovered that when I burn photos to disk with iPhoto it will keep the original RAW file and also a modified file of the photo in jpeg format. So after I did all that burning I uploaded almost 400 pictures to snapfish to be printed and I didn't have to go through and edit the RAW ones because they were in jpeg too! (So there Morgan, my MAC is good for something!)

This year I've vowed to edit, delete, print, store and burn in a more efficient and timely manner. So I don't spend a week doing it at the end of the year. The majority of the 400 pictures I had printed are going to go in photo albums. When we were in Kansas for Thanksgiving at my SIL Morgan and I were looking through the photo albums she has. She isn't a scrapbooker but does a nice job of printing and storing her photos in albums. And I just really liked sitting there flipping through them and seeing how the kids have grown and decided I needed to do that. I've already decided not to scrap all the photos I take so it only makes sense to put some in an album. I loved looking through the albums my mom has when I was a child and I'm sure Owen will too. He already loves the first year album I made for him. It's been sitting on the dining room table since I finished it (I haven't decided where to keep it yet) and he climbs up on the chair and sits there and flips the pages saying "baby" "baby" "daiy" "daiy" (which is his word for me and Morgan).

I'd like to invest in an external hard drive so I can store pictures on there instead of always on the computer. A DVD CD can hold a lot of photos so I don't want to have to worry about losing them until I have enough to put on a disk. I don't like to waste space, even on a CD!

Lastly, Owen and I went to Ikea yesterday. It was a great trip. They have fun carts at Ikea. The wheels spin 360 degrees. And they have a small cart with a child seat that holds one of their reusable plastic bags. So we had fun perusing the store and spinning down the aisles. Then we had lunch in the restaurant (a little tricky with just me but we worked it out) and then finished up our shopping. I found a cute igloo tent for Owen. It was only $10! I also found a wall mount bar that holds plastic cup things for my craft room. After putting up my new shelf I tried to whittle down the drawer organizers on my table and this holds all my pens and some decorative scissors so they are within reach but not on the table.