"A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words"

I know it’s a cliché, but it does apply in my situation in reminiscing about stories about my dogs. The other day someone commented to me that I have a good memory because of the way I’ve been able to recall all these stories about Abby, Andy and Father. Regardless if I do, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how valuable all these photos were in bringing back old memories some dating back from nearly 15 years ago. Most of the times, I was fairly accurate in my entries, but there were a few examples where I had glossed over some facts or used a little license, and one of my relatives called me out on it.

My stories are broken up into three ‘eras’. Those from before I moved to NJ, the ones while I was living in NJ and experienced while I was visiting back down here in NC, and lastly the post-NJ stories from when I had moved back to NC. Even though breaking down the stories into these segments helped me to organize my thoughts, it was the pictures that helped recall memories that would otherwise be long forgotten. Also these pictures helped to fill in details that I would not have remembered had these pictures not been around.

The older photos were of the old fashioned kind using a point-and-shoot camera. Developing those things was not cheap. As I became more technologically proficient (I didn’t own a computer until I was in my late 20’s), I bought a scanner and scanned all of my photos. It wasn’t long until I bought a digital camera. That truly accelerated my photo-taking efforts. The only time I needed a point-and-shoot after that was when I took photos of the dogs in the pool with a waterproof camera.

The biggest nuisance about photos, digital or not, was organizing and labeling them. I probably have well over 400 photos of my pets, maybe more. It has been a herculean effort the last few months assembling them into folders and giving them understandable names so those looking at them in a later time will understand who and what is in those photos. Before this year, the photos of the dogs were scattered all over my hard drive. It was during this undertaking of assembling, organizing and labeling all of my photos of the dogs that the idea came to me about blogging about my pets. There were so many stories in those photos that it would have been a shame not to share them with someone.

And with that, the blog came into existence. My guess is that I’m about a third of the way through this blog, maybe halfway. For the most part, I’m still in the ‘pre-NJ’ era and have about a dozen or so stories from then. Soon I’ll be moving on to the ‘era’ from when I moved to NJ, and the stories I experienced with my pets when I was visiting back home.

I’ll resume my normal blogging tomorrow. Thanks for reading.