21:10 – Slides from heaven?

It’s day ten of this years first 21 day declutter challenge.

When my dad passed away almost 4 years ago, he left behind a few things, among them a couple of boxes with slides, photos, letters, videos and audio tapes.

When he was a young man, my dad used to work on a ship. I was only a little girl, but I remembered he would travel to all sorts of “strange” places like Africa, Australia, Asia…  I think he told me once it was easier for him to count the countries he had not been to than it was to count the places he had been.

When he was out and about, he would take pictures, video and even send messages home by reel-to-reel audio tape.

Quite a few of the pictures he took, seems to have been taken in the 60’s, especially around the time, he worked on, what I think was, a survey ship.

I’ve been looking trough these boxes now and then, even gotten rid of a piece here or there… but… it’s time to actually hit these boxes and do something with what’s in them.

Quite a while back, I went through all of the slides, and picked out the ones I thought was worth keeping. I’ll be scanning the keepers, so that I have them as files, should anyone ever want any of them. After the scanning I will most likely discard the originals as I have to borrow equipment to be able to look at them. If the result of the scans are OK, I might make a mini album of the best ones later on.

When I looked through them, I sorted them into discard and keep, but… I decided that my brother should really have a look at them, before the non keepers are thrown away.

You see, I loved looking back at the slides my dad took, and I thought my brother would love it too.  Even though some of them were almost beyond recognition as they where pretty ruined, it still gave us a look into a life my dad had had. A life that we know very little about, as I was just a toddler, and my brother wasn’t even on the horizon at that time.

Last time my brother visited, we had a little stroll through history, and decided together which ones we want to keep for us to scan 🙂

I will bring them in for scanning or do the scanning myself sometime this year, but for now at least… I can get rid of the ones that are not worth keeping.

It was never a big collection (actually it was pretty small) even so, there are 373 slides going out the doors today (we are keeping about 220).

There was a bit of a debate on how I should count these as items out-the-door, 1 slide as 1 item? 5 slides as 1 item? or 10 slides as 1 item.

I’ll be doing regular photos soon, and to me it seems like 10 photos = 1 items is a ratio I’ll be happy with, and as slides are photos, it makes sense to me that 10 slides = 1 item 😉

Throw in 5 empty slide boxes (not counting the boxes the slides are in) and we have 5 boxes + 37 items (373 slides) =

42 items going out-the-door! 

Which brings my new grand total to 655 🙂