Second thoughts

5/17/10 Two wooden chaise lounge chairs, given away on craigslist

I'm in a bit of a funk tonight.

I've spent the better part of the year learning how NOT to be sentimental about pictures, and tonight I'm completely bummed out because I seem to have lost a whole bunch of them.

When we moved into this home, the previous owners left five old wooden pool recliners, which we have put to good use. Joanna never loved them, but I enjoy just about anything that is free, and they did their job. Over the intervening seven years, three rotted away to the point that I had to haul them off to the dump.

I managed to keep two of them functional, however, and wasn't surprised at all when I found several people on craigslist who would gladly take them off our hands for free.

To commemorate this downsize, I decided to pull out one of my favorite pictures: a shot of Joanna and I, in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, sitting on those chairs on December 31, 2007, surrounded by nearly 3 feet of snow. Despite the twenty-degree weather, we were raising a champagne toast to the New Year and celebrating a little Maine silliness. It was a fun photo to mark a special moment.

But I can't find the picture.

I've transitioned through a number of computers over the last few years, and have pictures saved on a variety of disks and a hard drive. But, try as I might (and I wasted over an hour looking) I couldn't find that picture. To make matters worse, I'm now recalling many other pictures that I can't seem to find. Alarmingly, there seems to be a digital gap of nearly two years, from 2005-2007.

I remain hopeful that a disk or two will turn up that has all of those pictures on it. Hey, I know they are only pictures, but there are some shots that I never wanted to downsize. Making the decision to part with photos is one thing, but accidentally deleting or losing them is a whole different matter.

Just pictures, right? Seems like a whole lot more than that, right now.