Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Spring in my house!

I have a new vase for new spring! I have been dying to have some ornamental cherry branches but haven't found any in a location that didn't "belong" to someone else. Then today I passed landscapers heavily pruning ornamental cheery trees and almost caused a wreck just trying to get back to them. I filled up the back of Mom's Jeep with my sweet smelling treasures, so pleased with myself and my luck! Plus I found another delicious vase at the wonderful Goodwill on 145th. I think they must have a pottery school nearby because I find the best hand thrown vases and bowls.

ornamental cherry

ornamental cherry

ornamental cherry

Duncan Campbell Eagle Scout Project - 1971, leaf identification for deciduous trees is really great.

The reason I had left my computer at all today was that my cousin happen to be in Redmond. Mom and I drove over for a quick visit. Great seeing him, feeling very far from Texas and family. My cousin's job is changing projection rooms to digital format. We got a tour of a projection room and explanation of how the enormous reels are moved around and made to *show* the movie. And the ease that the new digital format will be instead of film reel.

I understand the reasoning for going digital but I ranted all the way home (to mom) about what is going to be left in the future for us to have as as tangible link to our past. Film reels, airline tickets (all ready gone), baggage claim tickets, books, catalogs, phonebooks (well, I don't mind those disappearing), receipts, checkbooks, photo albums? Magazines, hence, magazine advertising, newspapers. Someone will discover up a dusty box in someone's attic and find an old cellphone and exclaim, "OMG, a Sprint Samsung phone!". Or look quizzically at a portable cd player, a tape deck, a thumb drive? A debit card, a relic? DVDs? We will watch all of our movies online. The things that will be our past will be metal objects with no personality. They will not be torn, worn or have have coffee stains from a 100 years ago. They will not have a personal message inside as a gift of a book would have. The smells of the past. No photo albums with handwritten notes of whom/date/where, those albums will live on someones computer. It will all be digital. Cold. Hard drives. Chips. SIM cards.

I know, I am ranting. This may never come to be. Just wondering "what will be the antiques of our future?" Just something to think about.


2 comments:

kate nelson said...

Terrific questions on the move to all things digital. Museums are built on the physical record--documents, photos, the stuff of our lives. If it's all online, there's no communal experience, no gathering place where we share what we can learn from our past. To a historian, there's nothing more golden than a hand-written journal. This fall, we had documents from early Spanish explorers, and I was stunned at the chance to see something in Ponce de Leon's hand. Blogs are beautiful, but not the same.

Michelle (a.k.a. la vie en rose) said...

oh these are gorgeous...i keep threatening to cut a limb or two from a neighbor's tree just to photograph them...