Pins and Things

I take a ma-hu-sive amount of photos on the daily.

It all started last February (2014), when I got really into Keeping Up With The Kardashians.  I loved the fact that they watched old home videos on VHS together.  I loved the fact that they had records of the girls growing up over time.  I kept thinking that these physical keepsakes were such a great way to stop, inhale, and remember what life has given me.

Rose garden next to my parents' home.

That's when I started this little blog and also when I started on my big project of going through digital photos from 2006 - 2012.

That big project actually used a lot of resources.  It made me feel a bit guilty (having grown up in Seattle for half of my life) about using so much paper.  So, I decided to make little boards on my Pintrest totally dedicated to my travels.  This way, I can keep up being GREEN instead of printing off so many photos.

One of my continuing goals for 2015--> KEEPING MY CARBON FOOTPRINT AS MINIMAL AS POSSIBLE.

Since, I'll be heading off to Seattle for the Chinese New Year Holiday, I made my very own Beautiful Seattle board!  I'm excited to go back home and take my husband around to my old haunts, visit my friends, and spend time with my family.  Looking back at most of my photos, we actually have been back to Seattle only during the summer.  Everything was so sunny, so warm, and so lovely…

I can't really remember what it felt like to be cold, but I'm expecting to be freezing when I get back.

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DIY: Old School Photo Album Project

I have been watching Keeping Up With The Kardashian recently and got inspired to make a photo album.  For our wedding a few years back, my husband and I got a photo album as a gift.  Pretty old school!  There were 500 slots for photos, so I went through my external hard-drive and pulled out some 500 photos ranging from my years in the Peace Corps (2006 - 2008), my year in Beijing (2009), and my first few years in Hong Kong.

It's a great keepsake that I can look at years later and see all the great times I've had!  <---that's the inspiration I got from Keeping Up With The Kardashians.  That family seems to really value memories, home videos, and photo keepsakes.  Anyhow, going through these photos helped me to remember a lot of great things that I had never told my husband about.

..like the time I was eating hot pot with my Peace Corps site mate and got something stuck in my throat.  A bit of backstory, I was placed in Duyun, Guizhou for two years.  My site mate and I had frequented this particular hot pot place over the course of our service and both considered it our favorite.  

...we were eating there for dinner, I got something stuck in the folds of my throat.  I panicked a bit when I realized that it was really sharp and I couldn't swallow it down.  So, my site mate and I went to the local dentist, where he put tongs down my throat and extracted a small piece of wood.  I was so relieved to have gotten that out of my throat and I was also SO FREAKED OUT that I never went back to that hot pot place again.  

That's what photos do for me...they help me to remember stories from the past that I can share with my husband, the ones I love, and my future kids!

500 photos

Photo album

To make this photo album more colorful and pleasing to the eye, I cut out construction paper "frames"

I thought I would add a personal touch and just write in captions, plus I was lazy!

The finished project!

Do people still make photo albums?  A friend suggested that I just get them printed out in book form.  Now, that is a great idea!