Saturday, April 12, 2008

And monie a canty day, John, we've had wi' ane anither. . . .

It's Saturday, and I could have slept in. Sleeping in is the very essence of "weekend" to me, and I usually make use of every opportunity that comes my way. I am a night person to the extreme, and I am at my most alert in the wee sma's. I would have been an excellent vampire; the hours are ideal, and the thought of being empowered to suck the very lifeblood out of anybody who wronged me is most appealing.

It worries me, those thoughts. I'd stop having them if I could, but since it's obvious to anybody who knows me even a little bit that I really like them they are beyond my control, I just have to live with them. It's a condition. I can't help it. I should be getting guv'ment money because I have a condition. Everybody else who has a condition is getting money for it.

It's not my fault that I have a condition. I should be monetarily compensated for having a condition. Gone are the days when vampires were labeled "monsters" and sold in plastic pieces by Aurora Models along with Frankenstein (which is NOT the monster's name) Wolfman, and the Mummy.

Whatever. I couldn't sleep in this morning, and it's my mother's fault. I gave her a Kodak S510 digital picture frame for Mother's Day (I'm early, but I couldn't wait to give it to her) (If you search carefully, you can find one for under forty bucks now!) and she let me take her old photo albums home to scan the best pictures so I can put them on the digital frame. (Digital picture frames are AWESOME. And wireless digital picture frames are even better!) (Mine has its own email address; let me know if you'd like to send me some pics.) (Seriously, I absolutely adore my beautiful, wonderful wireless picture frame.) (I'd love to get pictures from you!)

So, until almost 5 a.m., I was turning pages, scanning old photographs (some taken with a Brownie Starmite; some were taken with a little square brown plastic camera my mother had in high school; there were even a few tintypes!) People I've known all my life danced through those photo albums. My parents, aunts, uncles, neighbors. . . people I thought were OLD when they were actually in their twenties and thirties. . . and they were all so beautiful. My siblings, from birth to yesterday, changing so subtly year after year until finally they looked as they look today. The house where we all grew up: it was so TINY! I never noticed until last night just how small that house really was. My mother and father, interacting with us, in color and in black-and-white. . . somehow, the black-and-white photographs were far more beautiful and telling.

I finished scanning the stack of albums, but haven't trimmed and cleaned up all the pictures yet. And when I take this stack of albums back, I'll take home yet another stack.

It's a good thing I bought a 2-gig flash drive last night; the 512MB drive that's in her frame now would never be able to handle this kind of picture load. The new drive is a Lexar and it's only about an inch long. If you have a digital picture frame and want to use a flash drive with it, I highly recommend this tiny Lexar. It doesn't even show when it's plugged into the frame!

Buy it at WalMart or K-Mart, though. It's wayyyy cheaper there. Considerably. Isn't technology amazing? Who could ever imagine that something an inch long could hold thousands of pictures?

Anyway, back to my original point: I couldn't sleep in this morning because my dreams kept waking me up. Where did all of these young, beautiful people go?

Then I looked in the mirror and thought, "Yes, where indeed?" Sigh.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly