My Flickr account temporarily disappeared last Thursday evening as the site encountered a spam attack and my account was mistakenly flagged. I spent a restless and reflective weekend thinking that my entire digital image history was gone. I kept playing out the worst-case scenario considering I'd have to quit blogging and that Jay and I would go into old age without physical access to my complete digital image library. This led me to contemplate the whole idea of mortality and personal memory. Let me summarize by saying it was scary and depressing.
This space is not a task in vanity. It is primarily to let us remember the big and small points in the past 15 years of actual entries and far before. I discovered that my eJournal and images isn't much without the last noun! I do think I may be far too dependant on my own images though. I don't know how to proceed on fixing that.
For example, I just noticed on Facebook that some friends had posted photos from an Amsterdam to Rome cruise. I saw a picture of Lisbon and wanted to happily note the #28 tourist tram was running back in 2010. As I have access to many of our travel photos to around 70 countries, it only took a second to find this:
Or a picture of Jay's now deceased dad and shrine:
Or the black and white cat we befriended in Puerto Vallarta during our first winter of retirement:
Or the first car we had in Saudi Arabia:
Or grabbing my diploma from high school in 1977:
Or Cuba last month:
Or over 24,940 other things.