In my blog gardening (thank you Jamie I am stealing your term) I have stumbled across when I was in Germany for two weeks for work back in 2018. Granted I only have a handful of pictures that are in this blog and most of them came through my Instagram import I did a while back.

However, as I have been cleaning up some of the posts I see by adding the location of where the picture was shot for reference (thanks to Google Location Tracking), it has got me thinking should I take a little bit of extra time and recreate some events on my site? Maybe more specifically at a minimum, recreate or document places we visited and saw as I did for my family Trip out East and around Superior a couple years back (note you will not find it on the site yet as I kept track and never could figure out how I wanted to publish it). I do wish I did a better job of keeping track of those types of events or trips prior to the past year or so.

I was talking to my uncle the other day and my Grandfather (his dad) who was an accountant and had to bill his time to his clients by the hour kept record of pretty much everything he did but in very brief formats. He had a paper journal book for every year that would lay out people he met with and events in his life. For example, I saw the entry of where my mom was born (they wrote a different name than was hers so I guess they changed it later) in the morning and then in the afternoon it seems my grandfather had to go back to work as he then billed a client a handful of hours working on something. He also wrote down how much everything cost which was interesting to see that back then it only cost $18 for delivery and two nights in the hospital. Not sure how much insurance covers then but that is a shocking number compared to even what it cost for my kids 9-14 years ago.

I think of all that work he used to do journaling briefly moments of his life and I wish I had something similar but I do get caught up in that do I capture enough or do I capture too much. However, I just wrote out a paragraph of text explaining the couple of sentences I saw and could piece it together and found it interesting.

Now granted this day and age we even have the further benefits of quickly adding photos, GPS tracking, and stuff other data that could be easily included to our events in our life. However, that might be the problem is we try to correlate or craft the perfect end product vs just quickly jotting something down that if anything will jog our memory to what we were doing or thinking at that moment in our life. Maybe life changing like a birth or once in a life time trip or maybe just something like met a new friend in person for the first time.

One could say that sounds great start today and move forward why go back and put together something that took place 6 years ago. Well, I think it is because I have still been finding great joy in clicking the “On this Day” button and finding out what I did years ago. This is also the perfect time to remind myself and anyone else that needs some encouragement that in the end I am not doing it for anyone but myself. Maybe in the end my kids will look through it but I am not counting on that if anything it is interesting for me now so why not!