I do a lot of looking back. I guess all of us in the field of genealogy do that don't we? This past year didn't go the way I'd expected it to, at least not in terms of researching and recording my family history. I started off pretty well but was completely derailed when my friend Bob died in March and my mom just a few weeks later in April.
My New Year's resolutions for 2007 included three things: tagging all my photographs, giving up my Diet Coke habit to become a tea drinker, and picking a project from my theme/focus list for 2007 and seeing it to completion.
I started off tagging my photos and that was going quite well until I realized that Adobe Photoshop products and Google's Picasa don't play nice together. Tags created in one didn't always show up in the other. It caused me a great deal of frustration and I was not able to resolve the dilemma of how to create tags once that would be available in both programs. So I gave up on tagging.
I worked very hard at cutting back on the Diet Coke consumption and increasing my tea drinking. I have to give myself at least partial credit on this one. While I haven't entirely stopped my consumption of Diet Coke I have cut down a bit. And my tea consumption has gone up considerably. I've even gotten in the habit of carrying my own tea bags in my purse so that I have no excuse for not drinking tea when I'm on the go.
The project I picked to focus on for 2007 was the family cookbook. That project barely got off the ground. I was still in the stage of evaluating software and collecting recipes from family members when my mom died. Not only did I lose interest at that point but I was distracted by the larger project of helping to settle my mom's estate.
In addition to my three New Year's resolutions for 2007 I also identified 10 projects that all involved preserving memories. I made good progress on three of those 10 projects. Number six was to start writing my memoirs. I did that initially following Miriam's prompts and then finished the year with 24 blog posts about my memories of Christmas. Number eight involved digital scrapbooking. I had hoped to get one scrapbook page a week done, that didn't happen. But I did average almost two pages a month. Number nine involved getting an oral family history from my mother in law in and scanning all of her old photos and yearbooks. I didn't get the oral family history done but I did manage to scan all of her old photos and yearbooks (no small feat). I still have to burn them to CDs.
It would be convenient to simply say that I didn't accomplish as much as I wanted to in the last year because I was so distracted by the death of my mother and settling her estate afterwards. However, in truth I spent the largest share of my "free time" in the last year blogging, not dealing with my mother's affairs (although I did a good bit of that too). If I had done less blogging there's no doubt I would've gotten more of the other things done.
Tomorrow I'll review my blogging in the past year.
