Tika & The Dog Days of Summer

This is how Tika is spending the hot 90o+ Spokane days of summer.......... belly up in my chair (on a heating pad left over from just barely two weeks before.....how the weather changes). In Spokane we're indoors during the HOT days, doing projects, and indoors during COLD days, doing projects. "Whatever, "says Tika, "works for me!"

I have made productive use of these hot days. I visited my 90 year old mother and chatted with her as I sat on her living room floor paging through some 30 photo albums. These albums are destined for the trash. No way around that fact. And by inferrence, all my photo albums are eventually slated for the same fate.

So I went through them and pulled out dozens for re-use. I took some of extended family to use on birthday cards to them....... surprise! I took ones of my Dad in the early days of his Air Force career..... to complete a scrapbook that I'm giving to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum in Ohio. I took funny ones to share with family "just cuz."   You know how over the years we give our parents copies of the family photos we take of our children? I pulled out all those extras and put them in an envelope to give to that (now grown) child.

It was a lovely day, sitting in Mom's cool house reminiscing with her and paging through her tangible memories. It's very, very hard to think of trashing these albums but time and fate decree it must be done. Tika and I would both share this advice with you:  If YOU do not do something that's easily shareable with all your old family photos NOW..... RIGHT NOW..... when will you have time? And will you shed tears when you see them all stuffed into black plastic bags and set out on the curb???? 

This just might be a worthwhile project for those Dog Days of Summer. Tika agrees.