photo organizing in progress

In order to get my hands on all of the family pictures to be able to make my "countdown to 30" collages, I told my mom that if she brought me all of the pictures from the 80s and 90s when she came to visit back in December, I would bring them back to her perfectly organized.

Man, I didn't know what I was getting myself into.

We'd actually sorted the pictures into decades and attempted to mark the years of the events a few years ago but didn't get beyond that stage. So she showed up with 7 photo boxes packed full to practically bulging.

Step 1: Sort each box into years as best as I could.

Step 2: Lay out pages marked with each year on the kitchen table.

Step 3: Move the contents of each sorted box to their respective spots on the table.

I discovered after I was done sorting to this stage that there's pictures missing. The pictures are mostly from my high school years but particularly '95 and '96.

Step 4: Sort each year chronologically and separate by event. This step tends to take a while because it also involves verifying to the best of my ability that the events associated with a particular year actually happened in that year.

Step 5: Place each event into its fresh, new, labeled envelope and discard old packaging. Add negatives as applicable.

Step 6: Place envelopes back in empty photo boxes.

Step 7: Sort all loose pictures back with their "friends." This will happen after all the packaged pictures are sorted. I haven't gotten here and I'm not looking forward to it because, well, there's a lot of loose pictures.

So far I'm through about 1987. There's a ton of pictures of Erin. Wow.