Accomplishing Absolutely Nothing

Dontcha love it when you spend an entire afternoon working on a project and realize that it was a total bust. That was just before I dropped the sugar container on the floor and spilled half of it...but let's not talk about that.

The project started back 2 years ago. Sorta. It began with my mother's 90th birthday party. I bought one of those photo frames for her and filled it with photos from all of her life, starting with her childhood on up to her great grandchildren and everything in between.

She enjoyed it, for the few minutes she watched it, but when it was over, she packed it neatly in the box it came in and that was the last she paid attention to it. A few years before that, I had given her another photo frame, which she watched. Once in awhile. But then she decided she didn't want to leave it turned on, so she put it on the floor, where it has been gathering dust ever since.

I left the dusty photo frame there and took the birthday photo frame home, where it has been sitting there gathering dusts ever since.

HOWEVER, now we cleared and then returned stuff to the living room and in the stuff that was moved about was the photo frame. I decided it would be fun to make a separate slide show, of all Christmas photos. I worked on that for a few days earlier this week and had something like 190 pictures on it. Today I decided I wanted to add more, so I went hunting through CDs and the photo albums I could get to and I spent the entire afternoon (after going and giving blood this morning) working on finding photos, scanning them, correcting the color balance (love that PhotoShop!).

When I gave blood this morning, they told me "no strenuous exercise," and while doing all I did this afternoon certainly doesn't qualify as "strenuous exercise" it was certainly much, much more than I do during a normal day.

Up and down, back and forth, carrying stacks of books, delighting in finding photos I had forgotten about. I was so pleased that I got as much done as I did. To really do a good job, I should go up and downstairs and get photos from scrapbooks stored upstairs, but I decided not to do that.

Thank GOODNESS!!!

Finally, around 3 p.m., my slide show was ready. I put it in the photo frame and turned the thing on. It seems to choose the pictures at random, not in the order I arranged them, but...ok. It appeared I was going to have to see all 190 of the photos I had uploaded first before I could see the new pictures.

Then error slides started showing up. Pictures of a disk with a big red x through it. I paid attention to where they appeared, between which slides and I went back and looked at the disk on my computer...and where the error messages appeared, there were no photos. Photo A was followed by an error and then by Photo B. WTF? In several spots the error messages lasted as long as 30 seconds (I counted).

Finally I thought I had fixed it, put the slide show back in again, and again had to watch the entire thing to where it cycled back to the start...and I realized not one single picture I had added today had been displayed. Damn! There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the photos and, in fact, my mother's slide show was almost entirely made of scanned pictures and that had played just fine, so it couldn't be the scanning.

I decided to try a test and put all of the scanned photos on a separate disk and added that to the photo frame and not one of them showed. Not a single one.

I had spent 3 hours or more working on a project that was useless.

Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I removed all of the scanned photos from the disk and left it just filled with pictures of Brianna's first three Christmases and lots of cute dog Christmas pictures. But I took all those scanned photos and made a slide show out of it, which I have posted on YouTube and Vimeo.

Christmas Through the Years from Bev Sykes on Vimeo.

The background music is Lawsuit's Christmas song, which I mentioned in the entry about musical Christmas memories.

I guess I'll keep the photo frame disk and add pictures from this Christmas and just keep adding them each year until the frame stops working. But in the meantime, at least I have the best of our kids' first 6 years, or at least what I chose today.

Bah Humbug.