DadJack.com Blog

I love new and creative ideas, especially when I throw random thoughts out into the blog world and you guys share.  So when I said I was over flowing with kids drawings it was no surprise that you guys had some great ideas, the one that was most popular was to scan them and save the files or make a photo book from them.  I thought about this for awhile, and it did solve my storage issues, but for some reason it rubbed me the wrong way…  Partly because this plan requires me to throw them away after I scan them.

We have become very used to living in a virtual world, giving up more tangible variations of things.  No longer do we have a record (if your old like me, CD is you’re younger) collection our music is on MP3,  Movies are no longer stored on DVD but downloaded or streamed on demand, photos are shot digitally and stored on a hard drive, very rarely printed… Heck, now-a-days you don’t even have the burden of storing these files on our computer, they can be stored in the “cloud.”  And this has made life easier, less expensive and less cluttered.  We didn’t really need to be able to touch these things… Although some of my fondest memories are of listening to a new album while looking at the artwork and reading the liner notes, spending late nights at Tower on Sunset thumbing through records, CD’s and videos with my friends or discovering exactly how the photos I shot came out after getting them from the lab, seeing if I technically made the right choices and what the results were.

So does it make sense to scan and toss the kids art… Yes and no.  Those tattered papers, covered in crayon and marker with the images conjured up by innocent, developing minds may not last as long as a digital file, but they also were touched by those little hands, colored wax pressed under the pressure of tiny fist directly to their surface.  There is no piece of famous art work I cannot Google and see at an instant right here on the couch where I sit typing this… But it’s still not the same as seeing it in person.  I thought what if when I gave my Mom the ashtray I made her in elementary school (Yes, we used to make our parents ashtrays!) she told me how much she loved it, took a picture and tossed it?  Sure, we’d always have the photo to look at, but it just wouldn’t be the same.

So I re-evaluated my original concern over what to do with the kids artwork…  And the answer was still found in those suggestions, the solution was digital.  With all the space I save by having my music collection on a cloud, my photos on a wafer size chip, movies streamed directly to my TV, books stored not on shelves but on a device no bigger than the composition books they used to make us journal in at school… I can fill all that extra space with the kids art work.   I figure I’m still ahead, just based on the thousands of songs in my iPod, Those thousands of records would take up way more space than those drawings…  And someday my kids kids will be able to touch the same paper their parents did when they were their age.

Rock on, Jack

Yesterday was the longest day of the year and summer has officially started… The only bummer of my new apartment is no swimming pool.  The kids swimming was getting very strong with all the pool time we got last summer.  My favorite part of this season are the warm nights… there’s nothing like sitting out on a patio on a warm summer night (Unless you live somewhere with a lot of bugs… then you need that bug zapping light thing!)

The new car is amazing… But I have to re-train myself, I keep rolling down the window and opening the door from the outside (That’s how you had to get out of the “Busty Old Car”)  Speaking of the B.O.C., I found a way to hopefully subside some of Lucy’s sadness over getting rid of it… I pried off the emblems and printed out some photos of us with the car and made a shadowbox with them (I’ll have to take a pic and post it, it turned out pretty good) and hung it in the kids room….  Kind of like a shrine to that beat up piece of metal.

I haven’t had a chance to watch much of the summer programming yet… I’ve caught the show with Jillian from Biggest Loser (Didn’t like it) and Last Comic Standing (Like it), but that’s about it so far.  Has anyone seen the new Betty White sit-com?  Any good?

Right now kids shirts are on sale at Threadless … $9 bucks, got Lucy a shark shirt and Bing a cat shirt (They didn’t have any featuring bowling balls or golf balls).  While I’m plugging sites, Gilt has some cool kids stuff on sale too… They always have cool kids stuff, the adult stuff can be kind of pricey, and Groupon is perfect for Non-Diet Stench today with a great BBQ deal.

Farrell’s tomorrow!  Can’t wait to have a sundae… You cannot go to Farrell’s and not have a sundae!!!

I know he’s my kid, so I am a little biased… But I keep rewatching the Bing golfing video, no matter what that kid does he makes me laugh.  When I was a Michael’s getting my shadowbox I picked up some art supplies for Lucy, she is a very talented artist and is now into sketching … If she ever becomes a famous artist I will have the complete early years archive, I have hundreds of drawing and painting shoved everywhere.

I’ve always been super paranoid of this!  I can’t believe I missed this.  Beware of what you say to Rolling Stone… It may get you a quick trip to the President’s office.  What? L.A. didn’t make the list?  Has anyone seen this clown?   A 75M fixer upper.  Yeah, so? At least he’s clean.

Rock On, Jack