The old way, the new way

As I get older my memories tend to get a little more embellished and selective, if that makes any sense.  I don't know if they become less accurate per se, but perhaps a little more filtered.  In other words, I remember the really good things and forget that there may have been some bad in there as well.

It's no secret that I love photography as well as taking pictures.  Yes, there is a difference.  Perhaps I'll do a future post describing my take on those differences.  And I love to look at pictures, almost more than taking them.  I get excited when other people go on vacation because I know when they get back they'll have a set of pictures - and with any luck I'll be able to sit down and look at them.

I have always loved slide shows.  Mom and dad may have different memories about me, but I remember loving when we would go to grandma's house and they would pull out the slide projector and load up each of the trays.  We'd lay down in the living room with the lights out and watch as each of the pictures went by - each with their own story and memory.  The pictures were of times past, and seeing them allowed some to re-live the times, and some just to catch a glimpse and share in them.  Dad has a bunch of slides from his mission in Scotland, and I loved to look through them.  We didn't have the full slide projector in our home, but dad had a small viewer where you could put one slide in at a time and then look at it through the light.  It was almost like being there.  When dad talked about the "Highland Coos", we knew exactly what he was talking about.  We'd seen them too through his slides.

Over the past 15 years or so I've taken a lot of pictures.  And most of them are in albums on our bookshelf.  At times I've sat down and opened them to re-live some of our own memories.  Every once in a while the kids would sit with me and laugh about something or someone in them.  I love that!  But what I craved was the ability to sit everyone down and to have an old fashioned slide show.  To get the kids in the room and douse the lights and show pictures on the wall while we talked and laughed.

So I've done it.  In the last few years I've gone completely digital, and that has allowed some latitude in my dream.  Over the past few weeks I have built a Media Center PC.  There are a lot of features on it, but the number one thing for me is I now have a way to show my photos in the family room on our TV.  Sure, it's not an ultra-big HD fancy TV, but it works and the pictures look great.

So now I get the kids together and lay back on the soft.  We douse the lights, put on some music in the background, and re-live our memories together.  And it's heaven.