Day 188, Year 10: Obsessions
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2015
Weather: Overcast, Rainy, and Cool, Winds E to ENE 12
Location: Lightkeepers Marina, Little River, SC
I would say that Mark is obsessed with making To Do lists and then checking jobs off the list as fast as he can. He just can’t stand to let something stay on that list. When we were much younger and lived on a farm in southern West Virginia, I would dream up all of the things that I would like to have done to improve the property and write them down on a list. I was thinking in terms of years to complete the jobs. But as soon as they were written down, Mark would take that as a mandate that they had to be done immediately. Since this involved projects on 40 acres of land, he could never get that list to what he would call a manageable level. Today he continued working on his boat To Do list. He got a lot of the jobs done yesterday and today he completed was purchasing and installing a new Teleflex gear-shift cable. That was a difficult job, but he got it done. He has a few jobs left, but not many, so he’s in a good place and not feeling quite so compelled to work, work, work. But still, his To Do list will always be his obsession.
Now . . . he would say that I am obsessed with taking photos and then editing and naming every single one of them that’s worth keeping. When the photo is in the flora or fauna category, I try to do the research necessary to name each plant or animal with its common name as well as its Latin name. This takes hours and hours. I know that no one that looks at the photographs cares, but it’s something I really love doing. While we were in the Bahamas the number of photos and videos taken, including those taken by Claire, was 3,490. Today I finished the final editing and posting of those photos (hurray, hurray) which ended up to be 1,711 photos and videos in 85 different folders totaling 10.3 Gigabytes. Some people play Sudoku, some play Words with Friends, some work crossword puzzles. I don’t do any of those things. I just see life as an adventure that must be documented through photos and then each of those photos must be edited and named with love. Today I completed all of the photos from our Winter 2015 Adventure, so I can now go back and edit and name photos from last fall that never got done—grandchildren playing soccer, our trip to Battleship Cove in Fall River, etc, etc. I will always have a “Photos to be Named” folder on my desktop and when I don’t, I’ll know I haven’t been doing anything worth recording. So now you now know why I am constantly saying that what I did on a particular day was edit and name photos. It is a never ending job that hopefully will never go away. That is my obsession.
Late this afternoon, we headed over to Patsy and Joe’s. Patsy had called earlier to invite us over for dinner—pork chops, kale, pinto beans, and corn bread. Now who in their right mind could turn that down? Certainly not us, so off we went. Dinner was delicious and after dinner, Patsy and I looked though two huge under-the-bed type boxes, each filled with old 33 rpm records. She really doesn’t want to move them to Nashville and wanted me to go through them to see if any were mine. Some were, but we’re not interested in keeping them either. I pulled out a few Beatles albums and left the rest to go to the Salvation Army. Hopefully over the next week while we are here, I can help Patsy go through other things that she needs to sort out before moving.
