I’ve been busy in a happy, sad sort of way. A bit more on the sad side, to be completely honest.

It all started when I went looking for older digital photos and fell down one rabbit hole after another. In preparation for the eventual rewrite of the Sirius website, I decided to right size all of my collar photos. Yes, there are more than 400 of those, no they will not all be going on the website, but when they come back around for Instagram and Facebook, they will be better optimized.

Then I started going through my Camera Roll on One Drive, which led me back to the 7500+ photos and videos on my phone. I decided it was past time to really clean house. I’m down to fewer than 4000 photos and videos on the phone now, and I’ll make another pass after I have a chance to recover. I’m currently on 2019 on the Camera Roll on One Drive, and that one is both particularly hard and very happy. I retired – YAY! We decided to add a cute little guy to our pack – and those photos of Baby Yaar-Jan from birth to nine weeks at Lorraine’s are so precious. Then a couple of weeks before we were to pick the wee boy up in Colorado, we lost Frank – and all of it is right there. The photo journey of his last couple of months, knowing that the end was approaching. Every precious moment, every smile, every tear. Then to keep the rollercoaster ride going, the trip to pick up the puppy; so much energy with life unfolding before him, before us.

I can’t quite decide if my heart is breaking or if it is overfilling with joy – or possibly both at the same time.

The digital cleaning journey continues, complete with the loses and the gains, the smiles and the tears. A lot of images have found the trash bin, most of those the detritus of daily living – quick pics of things that seemed important at the time, saved memes, things of no real importance. Add in the well intended but really bad photos that never got cleaned up, and there is plenty of opportunities to free up space. On the flip side, rediscovering favorite photos and assigning value to them again . . . Yes, that is what makes this not so little venture well worth the time spent.