Month: September 2020

The Family Photo

~ meh ~ Leave a comment

The air is getting crisp, those weird cinnamon brooms are in Trader Joe’s again, which can only mean one thing: that time of year is fast approaching……………

Time for the family photo.

Every year I force everyone to sit down and take one “nice” family picture. My husband calls it The Day of Tears. More than once the person in tears has been me.

This is not something I do to satisfy my masochistic tendencies (which, let’s be honest, I have).

It’s because way back in the day, the first year that we were married and living in Kentucky, I thought it would be nice to send a card to everyone back home letting them know that we were surviving marriage and…well…Kentucky.

So I started going through pictures from the year and found exactly zero–ZERO–of just the two of us looking normal. So I made us sit down, put the camera on timer, and take a picture of us and the dog.

Look how CALM everything is! How the lighting is just right. Sigh.

And there it was. The birth of the Day of Tears.

Yes it feels like a lot of effort for something so cheesy, but I know that when we get old(er) we will enjoy having a picture of all of us together each year. And so I power on.

I set a few ground rules:

1. We take the picture ourselves (I refuse to pay someone to watch my family melt down)
2. Everyone in the family has to be included
3. You have to be able to see everyone’s face
4. >=50% of us have to look happy.

Over the years things have become progressively more complicated.

Seating got a little tighter.

Then emotions got involved.

There ARE years where everyone appears relatively happy (or at least not hysterical) and is looking at the camera.

Those are special years.

As the years progressed wardrobe warfare has added an additional psychological element to the process.

And our bench is gradually beginning to collapse.

But I power on.

There are people who have accused me of staging our photos, or that we intentionally find a picture where one kid looks pissed.

To those people I say: you clearly have never seen the outtakes.

I also just realized that Eddie wore the same shirt two years in a row.

And yet she persisted.

WE’RE BACK

~ meh ~ 4 Comments

I think.

It’s been almost two years. A while ago WordPress did something weird and I couldn’t figure out how to post. I lost my password. I tried another host and tried to make things look fancier. It didn’t really fly. I gave up. My blogging life was part of the past.

Then a few weeks ago I got the reminder email that I get every year that my URL was going to expire. Given the fatalistic attitude I have towards everything right now I was like, whatever, who cares, none of it matters.

But the day before it was set to expire I clicked on the link in the email, just to make sure I couldn’t renew, and somehow it logged me in. Then I realized that it only cost me $16/yr to maintain over 10 years of stories from my life. Then I realized WordPress had GOTTEN THEIR SHIT TOGETHER (or maybe it was me, I don’t know) and…

HERE WE ARE.

Friends. I missed this. It’s good to be back.

The weird thing is, I don’t even know who these “friends” are. I am not part of some blogging community. I don’t know who even reads this. But man, it feels good to be sitting down writing something on here. I don’t know why. It makes no sense. At all. But it does. And right now I’m holding on to anything that feels good (within reason) and running with it.

I started this in January of 2010. Facebook was different, Instagram didn’t exist. Tumblr did exist (and apparently still does, I’m surprised to discover just now). I just spent the past hour looking back through old posts, realizing that they a.) aren’t as great as I imagined them to be in my mind, and b.) OLD. When I started this blog I had juuuuuust purchased my first smartphone (the Droid, complete with a slide-out keyboard). I was using a Motorola RAZR a month before we started this thing. I still had a myspace account. THAT’S how long it’s been.

Back then blogging was big, but also already felt like it was maaaaaaybe on the way out? The pioneering bloggers started in the early augts. Now with social media and Medium and just the fact that there is too much of everyone’s opinion EVERYWHERE, plus the fact that I’m creeping towards 40, blogging seems a little…dumb.

But when has being dumb ever stopped me.

Case in point: this post.

OK well I’m glad we just took that journey together. If you hang in there, I promise there is more to come.

Welcome back.