Friday the 13th Memories

[Note: I'm transcribing the videos I posted on my YouTube Channel and back dating them to when I posted the videos for people who prefer reading. If you prefer watching the video, visit my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@suzannesewell]

Today is Friday the 13th, and although I'm not superstitious about Friday the 13th anymore, there was a time when I was a little bit superstitious. I was reminded of that this morning when December 13th many years ago fell on a Friday and I was expecting my first child. Depending on which method you believe, my due date was either December 9th or December 12th. Although 12/12 would have been a date that I would have loved as a birthday for my son, it came and it went. I really did not want to give birth on Friday the 13th. Today that would have been pretty cool with Taylor Swift, Dick Van Dyke and one of my great friends celebrating their birthdays on December 13th. I found out about Dick Van Dyke's birthday when Coldplay released a new video on his 99th birthday filmed with him at his home.

That Friday the 13th, perhaps imagining that we may not have that many date nights left in the near future, my husband and I went to see The English Patient in the theater. We sat in the back row in case we had to make a hasty exit, but luckily I got to see the end of the movie and enjoy our last weekend before kids.

Another little connection which is kind of funny is that last night, I was telling my husband about the video I posted yesterday about 12/12/24 where I was talking about my mastermind group and how my takeaway this past year was to better accept periods of contraction along with periods of expansion or flow. He asked me if I think of going into labour when we talk about periods of contraction. It had never occurred to me so now I can't get that out of my head.

So now, it's kind of funny that today's date is reminding me of going into labour many years ago so that was a funny coincidence or a nudge of a few different things to inspired me to record the video and write this blog.

I think of that with reviving our memories when we are reminded of something or we get a nudge, to tell the story or revive buried memories. I had a nudge like that last week when I saw my son's birthday coming up in the calendar. I recorded another video I haven't posted yet about using the birthday nudge to work on his childhood album that I hadn't completed yet. In the video, that I'll complete and post now, I talked about how to plan an album like that because it's really difficult in the moment to decide what to include because in the moment, everything seems important. In a way, procrastinating on making this type of album is helpful, because in hindsight we get better perspective and it becomes easier to choose what is most meaningful.

I like to use these nudges to spend time with my memories and to revive things that matter. It's not necessarily about having a project or making photo albums. It can also be about telling the stories, looking at other memories like a pregnancy journal or time capsule to be reminded of other moments. Spending time with our memories when we're given reminders helps us to remember them better.

12-12-2024: I Love Numbers

[Note: I'm transcribing the videos I posted on my YouTube Channel and back dating them to when I posted the videos for people who prefer reading. If you prefer watching the video, visit my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@suzannesewell]

When I wrote the date at the start of a call on December 12th, I realized it was 12-12-24. When I notice numbers or patterns; whether it's my favourite number, 20, or times on the clock like 11:11, 2:22 or 4:44; it makes me notice and gives me hope that whatever I'm working on, I'm going in the right direction. This reminds me that I noticed 10:10 this morning and 11:11 so I thought I'd record a video (and write a blog post) to remind me that I noticed 12-12-24 at the start of our last Mastermind session. I also woke up at 5:55 and took a screenshot when I noticed the time.

I've been a part of a mastermind for three years with yearly programs. Today was our last session for this year's Mastermind group so I'm kind of sad that it's over but grateful that it happened if we think of that famous quote: 

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened"

Dr. Seuss

Part of our meeting today was looking back at our takeaways from the year and for me, what I shared about one of my takeaways was about accepting that along with periods of expansion, there are periods of contraction. I have these amazing moments or ideas and then it seems like there's a period where nothing seems to be flowing. I saw this with relation to memories as well, that we have extraordinary days or moments and they're special because they don't happen all the time. If every day was extraordinary, they would become ordinary.

I've taken a lot of notes over the years of what I've been working on and I notice that there's some periods where it's like an idea flows into another flows into another. I had some blog posts where they just flow into another, then there ccan be months where nothing new is coming up.

I still get discouraged sometimes but I think that's what I've been working on to continue to try to accept that I can't be creative every day or coming up with an idea, composing a melody, writing a blog post or recording a vlog. But when I'm inspired, I want to act. 

Today's date reminds me of February 22, 2022 (22-2-22) when I composed a melody that was in a beat of two. Noticing that number gave me a nudge or an idea to create something fun and it added a little whimsy in my day. 

So today, I just wanted to capture that moment, create a video and share.

As I was editing the video, I wanted to find a world clock with the date and noticed it was 4:44pm. Love it.

Protect Your Memories from Technology Failure

[Note: I'm transcribing the videos I posted on my YouTube Channel and back dating them to when I posted the videos for people who prefer reading. If you prefer watching the video, visit my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@suzannesewell]

Why am I so passionate about memories? I want to be in control of my memories and not lose them as technology changes, as devices break or get lost or even natural disasters. I want to help people ensure their memories are protected.

The first thing we need to do to preserve our memories is to understand the technology and where our photos are. We need to ensure that our phones, our computers and SD cards are backed up and how that works. I will cover this in more detail in a later post.

My husband and I have had multiple drives fail and it's scary. The first time, our MacBook was getting the blue screen of death. It would work for 10-15 minutes at a time but then would shut down. During the times when it worked, I was frantically copying files and photos to an external hard drive in order to preserve them. I managed to save most of the files that were meaningful, but lost a few. It hurts and is frustrating to lose files.

We then started to do time machine backups on our computers. When our iMac drive failed, we managed to preserve almost everything by recovering files from the Time Machine backup. A computer failing is like a fire destroying photo albums. I wrote in my last post that since I was a child, I knew that if I had time, in case of fire, I would grab the photo albums. It was a fear I often thought about.

It's been a learning process over the years, as one machine breaks, of learning how it worked and staying up to date with technology. A lot of times I didn't understand and when it failed, that's when I learned what I didn't understand.

Last year, I was preparing a presentation for a moms group about preserving memories and I wasn't sure whether I wanted to talk about technology. Everyone doesn't have the same technology and I'm not a technology expert. I have lost memories when technology failed me and I didn't fully understand how it worked. That's how I learned, but I didn't want to learn everyone's technology so I didn't want to bring it up. 

But as I was writing my presentation on my MacBook where all my photos were stored, my MacBook broke, two weeks before my presentation. So I thought, the universe wants me to talk about technology. I can't resist bringing it up. I asked the moms, if your computer failed or you lost your phone, would you be okay? Would your memories be preserved? Many moms' eyes opened wide with fear. I may not be able to teach someone how to preserve or recover their memories, but I hope to inspire them to learn or hire someone to help them.

When it happened to me that time, I was bummed to spend a lot of money on a new computer and because I was in a rush for the replacement, I didn't get the ideal computer for me, I bought something in stock. It was a calm process because this time, I also had a cloud backup. I recently realized that perhaps I didn't save everything once again, because again, I didn't fully understand how icloud worked. But that's a conversation for another day.

The first thing is understanding the technology we're using with our computers, phones and cameras and that is also for our old video cameras and cassettes we used to use and quality settings when we're digitizing. I'll be covering more of these topics in future posts.  The first step is understanding where our memories are so we can preserve our collection as a whole.

Preserving Memories in a Digital World

[Note: I'm transcribing the videos from my YouTube Channel and back dating them to when I posted the videos for those who prefer reading. If you prefer watching, visit my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/@suzannesewell]

I launched my YouTube channel in order to inspire people to preserve their memories and revive their most meaningful ones. The reason I want to do that is because I want to preserve my memories and revive the most meaningful ones myself. By inspiring others, by sharing ideas, I can also be preserving my memories and reviving what matters the most to me.

This has been something that has been close to my heart my whole life. Since I can remember, I have always known that if there was a fire in our house and everyone was safe, I knew where the photo albums were and I would try to grab them if there was time.

I'm not sure where this started. I don't know if there was a firefighter that came to our school and asked what we would grab in a fire, but it's something I always knew. No matter where I lived even after I moved away from home, I would know where my albums were so I could grab them in case of fire, or in case of evacuation. That was really important to me.

When we started a family, I started scrapbooking and my album collection really started to grow. I ended up with dozens of photo albums, especially after I was also teaching classes and hosting workshops where we would work on our albums together. As my collection grew, I realized that my escape plan didn't really work anymore. I couldn't grab all those albums in case of a fire. If I was given 24 hours to evacuate, perhaps, but in a spur of a moment, those albums would not be saved.

As a backup I used to keep negatives somewhere else, so if something happened to the albums, at least we had negatives to reprint the photos. This all changed when digital photography emerged.

I stopped scrapbooking around 2008 because I became overhwlemed. We had a digital camera for 3 years and as time passed, I felt even more overwhelmed and kept procrastinating. It got worse when we got cellular phones carrying a camera with us all the time. The number of photos we take now in one year is approximately what we used to take in 10 years. Globally we take 1.4 trillion photos every year. This is equivalent to100-200 photos a year on average per person in 2000; and 1200-1500 per year per person in 2020. (My average is much higher, how about you?)

What do we do with them all? Ten years after I stopped scrapbooking, I really felt the weight of the clutter on my shoulders, especially because it was so meaningful to me to keep my memories alive. In 2019, I started a big catch-up project called Revive55 Project, spending 55 weeks, ending on my birthday to get all my memories back in order. I wanted to stop feeling overwhelmed and scared that I would lose my memories. Of course, I had the memories in my head, but photos and memorabilia help us to remember. When we see a photo, we often say "oh right, I remember that". You may have felt that when you saw a Facebook memory pop up on your feed that you had forgotten about.

So much was happening with our kids in their teen years, and without scrapbooking, I felt like I would forget all the moments. Scrapbooking helps us to remember because we are going through and reliving those moments as we scrapbook. 

Some of the things I worked on that year, I realized weren't really time well spent; and other times, I wondered how we could do it more efficiently, and revive our memories in a way that it doesn't take so long. Because really, we don't want to be stuck in the past reliving our old memories. We want to relive them but not all the time. We want to also chase dreams, look to the future as we are living in the moment. We want to capture new memories, not just preserve our old ones. That's where Present Harmony comes in that we look back with gratitude of our memories we loved and we look forward with hope of capturing new memories and all of that happens in the present.

In the present, we're looking back. In the present, we're looking forward. Our future will become our present. That's why I wanted to find a better and more efficient way of preserving our memories so it's not as overwhelming a process as it could be if we tried to continue to preserve our memories in the digital world like we did in the film world. That old way didn't work for me anymore, so I wanted to explore new ways of preserving our memories.