Childhood Home (the pictures)

OK, These are some pictures that outline my childhood. Warning: There are baby pictures! I apologize in advance for the terrible photography skills and dry captions. To start out with, I have 2 pictures of the pets that I grew up with. (basically between 1988 to 1996 I lived with 2 cats and a dog. From 1997 to 2004 we just had one cat and several small pets. I had a guinea pig and a hamster, and my sister and I shared small snakes and a ton of hermit crabs. The one thing that I can't explain is that loosing a pet never gets any easier. Whether it was a tiny little snake, or a cat that began life around the same time you did and shared a home with you for 20 years.

Simon (left) and Dinah (right) were our cats when I was a baby. We adopted Dinah when I was 2. Simon was amazingly friendly and easy going and was with us until 1997. Dinah was slightly skitzy, but otherwise friendly and lived for an amazing 20 years.

This is Scott as a baby and our black Labrador named Mickey. Mickey was mild mannered, and loving. She was with us until 1996.

This is my 5th birthday (as far as I've been able to tell). I'm in our basement which still has the exact same decor as the day it was finished in the mid 80s. The green bench behind me is belongs to the Piano which is slightly out of frame. We got a newer piano around this time, when I began taking lessons. I played for 8 yrs.

This is my dresser. It's literally been the chest of drawers that I've had since I was born.

This is a bookshelf that was in my room as a child. As you can see, now it's used for media storage.

This lovely thing is a toy refrigerator that my father built for my sisters. It's been in the same room for over 20 years now and it's mostly filled with baby books and random toys.

This is a layout of my bedroom as far as I can remember. From the top left to bottom right: Golden-brown is my dresser, dark blue is my twin-size bed, medium brown is my small book shelf, black is my old CD player, light brown are wooden crates in which I stored books, light blue is the toy refrigerator, and dark brown is a plastic storage bin for random toys.

This is the closet in which I used to keep my clothes. Now it's, again, just storage for random cloths and a lot of old toys from my sisters and I.

And lastly is what currently occupies the room. We call it "the computer room" but it's an office where my parents keep their files and my mother's computer. It's also storage for anything unsightly.

What is this project and why am I doing it?

Putting on some music. Something with some meaning from my past... Ah hah: Third Eye Blind
Ah... that's the stuff.

So this is my first blog on The Evolution of My Cave. By cave I mean living space. I don't like to think of "man caves" because that's just not my thing ;)... The idea came to me a few days ago. I have some really interesting friends and love to hear about their past lives. Now that cameras are so common, remembering the past has a rather interesting aspect in photography. We still don't quite know what to do with it though. Many of us save photos that we've organized into albums and, up until the digital camera and computer age, that was about all that anyone really did with personal photography. I mean, all the potential to do something more was there. You didn't have to be a trained expert to know how to save glimpses of important events and people in your past. But I wish that my friends and people that I want to get to know would have photo albums of their past lives specifically. I mean, I don't need to know about their whole family tree, but it would be great if there was a quick way to look at some pictures with captions or any form of narration.

Today everyone has a facebook page. Ok, not EVERYONE, but in my generation it's hard to find people who don't. It's great to "friend" them on facebook and learn a few things about them and look at some pics of their past. But that's not quite enough to get to know someone really well. It takes a long time to make good friends, and with everything getting faster paced in life, why not try to streamline relationships? What if everyone had an album or some form of organized collection of pictures which outlined all the ways that they lived in the past. Just to have a photo-real glimpse of a person's history. It's neat to talk to people about where they've lived and it's one of the most interesting things to listen to when you're just getting to know someone. But a pictorial history would turn an interesting story into a moment. An encyclopedia of references when you interact, a memory that you will recall when you think about the early days of your relationship with this person. When we look at pictures from the past that have a connection to something familiar, our mind starts to rearrange itself. If it's something we remember personally, then our brains are able to refresh old information and strengthen our memory.

To start this project out I had to dig out my parent's old photo albums. I'm very lucky that my mom was organized enough to put them all together. Our basement storage closet has a rather detailed, full-color photo catalog of this family from 1985 to 2003 (when we started using digital cameras). Me being born in 1988, there's a whole lot from my childhood. So I spent 4 hours this past monday going through the albums one at a time. As I mentioned before, old photo albums have a rather interesting effect on your mind. When I was done, it was hard to remember the present. The beginning of the day felt like it was months ago. This is why I'm doing this project. This is why I want others do do this project with me!

So here's my first blog to start with. My second post is going to be about my first living space. It, unfortunately will be without many photos of my bedroom because I couldn't find a single picture of anything more than a wall and the inside of my crib. The task that I have in front of me is to come up with some pictures to represent how my life was and where I used to live. I already have pictures from three pieces of furniture that were in there. The room was so small that there may have only been 5 or so pieces of furniture total. I knew there were wooden crates with books and some plastic storage containers. So right now I'm going to draw a diagram of the layout at least.

I hope someone appreciates this. I know at least one or two people who may be reading, but one or two of my closest friends is perfectly fine because that is exactly what a life-albums is supposed to be for!