More Memory Lane

Another old picture, this one from July 2011, the month we moved to London. I don't think I ever blogged it before -- at least, not that I could find. I don't remember where it was taken. Maybe Notting Hill or Queensway, near the flat where we were moving.

As you can probably tell, I spent part of yesterday looking through more archives. I'm trying to make sure everything that is on a CD has been moved to a portable hard drive, because how long are those CDs going to be accessible? I already have to borrow a CD player from work to read them. Pretty soon even that will be difficult.

Here are two more photos from the beginning of July 2011, right before we left the USA:

We drove first to Michigan, where we left our furniture to be sold and put some stuff in storage in Dave's parents' basement.

Here's Dave at the home where his family once lived on Grosse Ile. The funny thing about this picture is, they didn't live there at the time it was taken. They'd already sold it, but as I recall we went back to pick up an old bathtub from the garage. Dave's father wanted to install it in one of his rental properties. While we were there Dave apparently felt the need to water the new owners' garden. Why he did this is a complete mystery to me -- maybe the plants were looking desperate. And what's that that tripod on the lawn behind him? Looks like something that would be used by a land surveyor.

And here I am in Saugatuck, on Lake Michigan,  where Dave and I caught the local Fourth of July parade. I remember this only because I blogged about it. I don't have that shirt anymore but I liked it -- I got it at the Bridgewater Commons mall in New Jersey. Lord & Taylor, I think, or maybe Bloomingdales.

It's kind of fun to root out these old photos that I'd completely forgotten about and show them the light of day.

What else did I do yesterday? Well, I read about 75 pages of "The Wager," which is really good. It's been fun to enjoy some non-fiction for a change. Reading about the perilous life of a seaman in the 1700s -- the lice, the typhus, the scurvy, the ever-present danger of falling overboard or getting tangled in the rigging, the rats, the filth -- makes me appreciate the luxury of my own life now. We don't know how good we have it, honestly. Just a couple of hundred years ago people lived truly hellish existences. (And still do in some places on our modern planet.)

Dave and I also went to the 50th birthday party of one of his co-workers. She had a little gathering at her flat in Lisson Grove, near St. Johns Wood. And when I say "little gathering," it was still too big for her microscopic flat. But we had fun and it was good to get out and socialize.

One of Dave's co-workers asked if I was still walking around the city with my camera as much. I said no, I haven't been, that I've been taking more photos with my phone these days. "They're almost as good as the camera photos," I said.

"But is it as satisfying?" she asked. And I thought, hmmmm...that's a good question. "No, it's not," I said. And maybe that's an aspect of photography that I've been missing lately -- the ability that the camera gives me to control more of the exposure. Something to think about. (It doesn't mean I will strap on the ten-pound camera and lens bag any more readily.)