Strange Creature...

I am a strange creature.

Many of you know this, but let me tell you a little story about my life that will drive the point home. Some of you don't need this to prove anything, but it's still an amusing illustration of the way I tend to go about things.

As many of you know, I have a fascination for the history of my family. One of the things that will thankfully forever be something of a mystery is my father's time in the army and, specifically, his time in Vietnam. He tells very few stories of that time in his life and I don't really push for more. I cannot even begin to imagine how hard it was and I would never ask him to revisit it unless he was willing to do so. I've involved myself in small ways over the years -- I saw the Memorial Wall with him, I ordered him new dog tags to replace the ones that had been stolen, I wear his army shirt, I send him Veteran's Day cards, I signed up for his unit at military.com in case any of his buddies should be looking for him. Little things that show how proud I am of him and how much I wish it had all unfolded differently. Well, my latest passion has been to take his "Views of VietNam" album and scan all the pictures in -- for him as well as for myself and anyone else in the family who might want them. Now, here's where the amusement factor comes in.

First, I was just going to scan them all -- I figured out how to do that with minimal manipulation of the pages so as not to damage the pictures. 92 photographs are in the album. That's a lot of pictures.

Half way through scanning them, I decided I needed to create a database so I could make notes of the ones that had captions. I thought it might be good to have a record of what the pictures actually depicted. In building said database (using Excel, of course), I came to the conclusion that I needed to rename all the scanned image files so that they were in order in the folder and could, thereby, be cross-referenced with the database. I also needed to record the page, the relative position on that page, and any notation my dad had put on the back.

Then, I decided I really needed to have the cover, the money, and the patches all scanned in, too. Six hours later, I had all the pictures scanned and codified and I was pretty proud of myself. Save file. Think.

The next day I thought to myself -- I'll have to sit down with dad and see if there is anything else he remembers that I should include in the database. And then I thought I should scan in the actual notations in my dad's own hand. I wanted to record the image of his notes to my mom in his own handwriting. I also thought that maybe it might be cool to build a slideshow complete with music -- basically, recreating the album as completely as I could in digital format.

So, in the end, one short evening of scanning some pictures has turned into many hours of work and a huge project that just keeps getting more complicated.

And that, in a nutshell, is me.