EARTHQUAKE!

Wow, who would have thought it! This afternoon, a little before 2 p.m., I was standing outside my cubicle at work on the 8th floor, hanging up some new pictures...the building started shaking. My first thought was that a transformer exploded or something along those lines. I went to the closest shelter-in-place area, but since the ground was still shaking I decided to run back, grab my purse and phone, and get to the stairs and get the he** out of there. I was truly scared - later, my co-workers said that by the look on my face, they knew they should get out. Glad I could be of service. LOL.

As it turns out, it was 5.8 on the Richter scale - not huge, but wow. The strongest earthquake in Virginia since 1897, it was centered about 90 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. As I left the building, I was able to check Twitter momentarily and saw people in other places asking if people had felt the earthquake...so then I knew that wow, yes it really was an earthquake we just went through. The quake was felt as far south as South Carolina, and all the way into NYC and up into Canada too. Again, WOW is about all I can come up with.

As it happens, Tod and the kids are in Ekalaka visiting Tod's family. I was thankful to not have them to worry about, since phones were not working, internet wasn't working - I would really have panicked not knowing if they were safe. There was hardly any damage in our area, no one was really hurt - how fortunate we all are.

That was definitely the strangest thing that I've ever experienced...and if given a choice, I'd like to never experience it again!

From behind the camera lens

If there's a camera around, I am most often the one behind it (even if it's an iPhone).

I spend a whole lot of time on pictures - taking the pictures, editing them (dumping bad ones, cropping, slight fixes), then uploading them to a photo sharing site, writing captions to tell the story, plus printing the pictures, putting them in albums, and writing captions in the albums. And all that is leaving out a new task that came along with buying a Mac: assigning keywords and peoples' names to the photos, so they can be easily searched. I spend a lot of energy on it for two reasons: first, I want our far-flung family to get an idea of what our daily life is mostly like (I don't take pictures of everything, despite complaints to the contrary), and second, I want to capture our family's activities so our kids (and us) can look back on them years from now.

Sometimes I wonder if I go overboard; by most people's standards, I probably do. I hear of other moms who don't ever print their pictures, who barely even upload them off the camera, or who upload them to share but don't bother with captions to explain what's what and who's who. Tod's Aunt Suzy said to me "You're quite a documentarian" and at first I bristled at that, but then I realized it is accurate to say what I'm doing is documenting our lives. I think I probably do fall into the "overboard" category, but I'm alright with that. I enjoy doing it, and I know all too well that time flies by and it won't be long before these kids are grown and the days of missing teeth, first days of elementary school, and first friends will all be memories. If I have the pictures, I can relive the moments.

I hope that one day Reed and Amy will look back and see this work as the treasure that I think it is. I don't have a tremendous amount of pictures of myself as a kid, and the ones I do have are so special to me. I hope the kids don't say "good grief, why did Mom take so many pictures?" or "can you believe she spent so much time on this?" or see the many photo albums as a burden. They are my gift to our kids, and I hope they'll know how much love went into every single bit of it.