Obsessive Photo Booking

Normally, I'm passed out around 10 PM. But, lately, I've been staying up all night working on a photo book of M and my first year together. Prior to the advent of technology - the blog! - I was a journal writer and it was always important for me to keep memories, photos, dried flowers from bouquets, etc. Now, I can make and print a gorgeous book! Dare I say that I'm published?

I've known about photo books but always thought they were really painful to put together. Doris went crazy on www.shutterfly.com and made all this Petunia gear - stickers, mugs, luggage tags, magnets. She even made a photo book for herself. It came out beautifully and was really inexpensive. I made K a photo book for her birthday and it went rather well (except that I forgot some important photographs). B and C have a photo book for each year they have been together.

So, I bit the bullet and started pulling our photos from my office computer, laptop, emails, emails from other people, shutterfly, blog. Do we need to go through facebook and see tagged photos? After missing photos from K's book, I'm neurotic about making sure this book has everything. I also want it to be correct so I went through my calendar and old blog entries to make sure all the dates were correct and everything was in the right order. I still have to go through my journal (memories pre-blog).

Besides having an amazing book documenting our life together, it has been really fun working on the project with M. Believe it or not, all of the photo layouts that I picked are straight and orderly. M picked the crazy slanted layouts. Since she has a better memory than me (most anyone or anything has a better memory), she remembered photos we should use or special memories to write about. It has been really touching seeing what she wrote for us. I love that this is something we are creating together.