Now We've REALLY Gone Digital!

Ever since finding out that we would soon have 5 people living in our overcrowded, 3-bedroom house, I have been on a serious decluttering mission. The amount of stuff I have given away, sold, recycled, and trashed in the past few months would make Clean Sweep proud. One particular thing that was stressing me out was huge rubbermaid boxes in the garage full of old photo albums. Did I ever open the boxes and look at the pictures? No, of course not. But obviously, I was not about to throw them away, either. The problem was that I had about 20 years of pictures, and they were taking up A LOT of precious space! So Craig and I started researching a way to get our entire photo collection digitalized. Basically, we were looking for a bulk scanning service. We came across www.scanmyphotos.com, and decided we would use them since they seemed to have the best price out there. I took every single picture out of every single photo album, boxed them up, and sent them off to California. In all, we ended up having about 7,000 photos digitalized. You heard it. 7,000! And when they were sent back to me, they arrived on 4 tiny little DVDs. I was thrilled. I immediately trashed every single hard copy photograph (don't worry, we've backed up the DVDs). Even Craig was shocked that I threw out my photographs, but I just had to get all that extra junk out of my house. In all, it cost us about $400. It would have been a little less if I hadn't paid extra for the service where they guarantee that your photos will be kept in the same order that they are in when you send them, but after spending 20 years keeping every photo in my life in exact chrological order, it was worth the extra $60 to me. So, now, in addition to knowing that my photos will be protected in case of a house fire (b/c I will keep backup DVDs at my mom's house), I am also able to easily locate any given picture from any given time period in my life and present you with gems such as these:

Craig and I looking like we are about 13 years old the summer we started dating

A picture some of you may recognize from 8th grade (you gotta love those outfits- notice I chose a picture that doesn't include me!)

And finally, a picture from 5th grade of my friend Stephanie and I with John Stamos (I know, you are all jealous - both that I met John Stamos, and that I have a denim clip bow in my hair)