The Skype's the Limit

My computer is maxed out -- at capacity with photos and music and Tolle/Chopra/Dyer downloads to listen to when I am traveling for work. I've been trying to make room by deleting duplicates and moving things over to an external hard drive. I've taken 18,000 photographs in the past year, many of them delete-worthy. I hope I was focusing on the right things.

This computer spring cleaning has given me a few gifts. First, I've made enough room for Skype which allows you to chat for free via webcam with family and friends.**

The second gift has been taking stock by looking at the past few years of photos just before my daughter celebrates her 3rd year and I try to figure out my 31st. Cleaning out folders, I found goofy stuff,



and sweet images I hadn't seen in a while.



If any of you have blogs that you would like to convert into a coffee table book, I can recommend Blurb.com. I must warn you, however, that the site has a feature that quickly copies all of the images in your entire blog history. The warning has nothing to do with the technology....it's for your heart.

When Blurb takes in the photos and SLURP! appears at the top of the screen, a thumbnail-sized window appears where each image flashes as it is copying.

Boom, boom, boom. The images fire one after another in the order that you posted them over the course of some years at the fastest speed.

For me, it was like watching a flip book of my daughter's life, my life with my husband, our lives as a family. My stomach grew in seconds on the screen and then hospital, home, and bam, bam, bam, before you know it, the website is caught up with today, and there she stands with her bob haircut and doing somersaults on the couch over objections in her Easter dress.



I am, I know, odd. I don't long for my daughter to be tiny. I don't miss the itty bitty stage of her life. I look at those sweet tiny feet pictures and I loved that time for what it was and who she was at the time, but I'm relieved that she can talk to me about her needs now. What gets to me is nostalgia about the inevitability of missing IT somehow, despite all of the photos. It being whatever IT is for her too.

All of this reminds me of that movie The Story of Us. Actually, it's more like the trailer for The Story of Us and what the film could have been.

In truth, the film itself falls flat and ends with Michelle Pfeifer screaming something about Chow Funs. But I thought the preview was so poignant about the passage of time and family and the beauty of unconditional love, it made me burst into tears when I saw it, way before I was ever married or a parent.



I'm working on being present. But it's all so fleeting. It's just -all of it- life, traffic, email - something I wish that I could slow down. How can I witness her life, and my husband's life, when it's all moving so fast.



***Note to all family & friends: download Skype and, in the words of Linda Richmond, "Call. We'll talk. No big whoop."