guys and gals, let me tell you, our computer is o-l-d with a capital whatever-the-egyptian-heiroglyph-for-"old"-is.
now, before you think about that and about the title and put them together and go, "wow, claire, awesome! you're getting a new computer for your anniversary???" the answer is nope, not this year at least.
but not only is the computer old, it hasn't even had an operating system update in years, it's started giving us cranky messages like, "this feature of microsoft word will not function on an os created before the invention of the horse." so msg decided maybe we better update our os. (cool lingo-bingo coincidence: "os" without the periods is like, greek for "bone" and is the root word in "ossified." it's also right there up front in the word "fossil," but i think that's another coincidence and not really etymology.)
unfortunately, the update says it takes 12.1 gigabytes of storage, and when msg checked our hard drive, it said it had 12.125gb of free space. meaning, even if it would let us do the update, we'd never be able to save another document again.
so msg goes looking for things to delete and finds a bunch of duplicate art files that are in photoshop with a shit-ton of layers, which is a big score because those eat the memory up like a hog in chips. he also threw out some video files and other major oink-o drive-space eaters. then he started looking around in his naughty folders for disposable stuff ... and some of the naughty folders include some of my photos and videos, and he peeked in there to see if there were some he wouldn't mind moving to an external drive, or some where we'd taken a bunch of repetitious shots from the same angle. (akane tweeted about this and made it sound a lot more like he was going crazy throwing out precious memories right and left, which was sweet of her to worry about but wasn't really the case.)
anyway, in one of the folders he found a photo shoot where there were a lot of pics "waiting" to be retouched, and they were all in photoshop format, i.e., giganto-sized files for no good reason.
so he went in and looked at them while saving them into png files, and on a couple, he stopped and did the touchup stuff (like fixing my shiny-ass forehead) that had been done on all the other files from the shoot like, 11 years ago.
and then last night he sat down and just went through all the rest of them and fixed them up too.
here are a couple!
but the anniversary present wasn't finding the pictures, or keeping the pictures, or touching up the pictures.
it was reminding me of our love in its youth, when it was bold and swaggering and full of itself, and I felt alive in the newness of everything. when a precious wash of daylight through our bedroom windows could put a glow on the whole world.
it's not that our love was better in those days, but that it was such an adventure. we had so much still to learn about each other, and you can just see in these pictures how full of eager amazement we were to do that learning.
i think i still have a trick or two to show him. and he still surprises me from time to time ...
seeing these pictures just reminded us both, i think, that we have that capacity for exploration within us.
what a gift! ... amiright?!?
