ThatGrrl

I began writing my own journals/ diaries as a kid in the early 1970's. There are at least eight books, most of them full of my thoughts, blabs, and so on. As I have moved from place to place along my life the books became collected in a plastic container with a lot of photos I'd taken from trips to BC, visiting my Aunt Emma and wandering around Vancouver, staying at hostels and hotels. Travelling on the Greyhound bus, which doesn't have that cross Canada route any longer. Family and cat photos too. the odd hand written page about this and that. Ephemera collected from my adventures.

I had seen the box, less than a year ago, stuck in the garage where my brother had put it. I didn't move it into the house, mostly because I live in one room and didn't have space for it. Of course, not every decision made due to laziness, indecision, etc. is not always the best choice. Earlier this year my brother began clearing out everything from the garage. He found the garage was infested with mice and rats from the past tenants leaving a lot of garbage in it, outside of the garbage put out in the regular pick up. I noticed the lid of my container was cracked, it wasn't before. But, again I put off doing much about it because I didn't want to figure out what to do with it. I looked at getting a new container for it, but didn't get one. So it sat outside in rain and I thought it was safe with another box on top of it to block water and it was under the roof of the garage, outside.

Today, my Mom opened it and found the water has gotten in. Mostly everything is damaged, some of it is ruined and it really stinks! I can see fungus/ mold on it. I can still smell it, even though I've washed my hands several times, changed clothes and left all of it out in the laundry room.

The plan is to sort through the photos and pick out what to keep. Most are ruined, all the ink/colour washed away from the paper. Some of them still have an image left in the centre. So, a few I have saved so far. Some (not many) are untouched by water. Ironically, most of them are from my wedding and I don't really care about them as much. There are a lot of them which were dripping wet still and hugely stink. I will try to sort them today. But, I have little hope for them.

I think I will bring my scanner out, hook it up to my laptop and scan all the old journals. Better than retyping them, I would have my original hand written pages, just made digital and less mildew and moldy. Then, sadly, I will throw away all those pages and books I've kept for so long.

The next thing is what to do with all those scanned pages. I guess I can post them here, as images with dates. That will make this a really long/ old blog. I think the earlies pages are from before the 1970's. One nice thing about scanning them is being able to see my penmanship over the years too. Retyping them can't do that. Plus, retyping them would mean guessing what some of them are. Instead of leaving it as original to figure out more than just once. Handwriting isn't as reliable as type, but its far more personal and artsy.

Anyway, that's what I will be doing over the next few weeks. I think it will be sad to dispose of the old journals themselves. All those originals. Some of them I still remember who gave me the blank journal or where I bought them from. I guess I can add that to the notes as I scan and post them.