Despite my packrat nature, I’ve been concertedly weeding out stuff of mine since moving to Portland in 2001. Back then, I started to work through my many books and ask, “Will I read this again? Will I even read this once?” …and away went tons of tomes. Summer 2004: I listened to many LPs, some so old they were 78 rpm (!), and found some that I wanted to keep, some that might make good decoration (one’s nailed to my wall now), and many that can go elsewhere. That’s an errand today.
And the last few weeks, I’ve been organizing massive numbers of photos: into albums they go, and dud shots go to the trash. A byproduct of this is the reprint situation: what to do with more than one copy of the same shot. I have my copies of, say, the photos of when the plane known as the Spruce Goose – properly, the HK-1 Hercules Flying Boat – was moved in pieces to a museum in McMinnville, back in September 2000. I have the negatives, in case I ever want/need more shots.
But when I have the chance, I’ll pass along the dupe copies as a gift to the museum that houses the plane.
And come Thanksgiving, I plan to take a real pile of old pictures, cover a table at my parents’s house with them, and say to the relatives, “Want any? Take them. Give them good homes!” That will be my early Christmas present to the family.
I hope not to jinx this by mentioning it, but I’m starting another Pill Hill job tomorrow. Back in an office, up on a hill with many cute nurses (though not as many as where I worked before, which was the OHSU School of Nursing). This could work.