Why does everything take so long??

I started out to do this one simple thing and I am now on Day 2 and counting. Back in 2015 I made Richard a little photo album showing the progression of his Halloween display from 2003 onwards. Since I was in the midst of creating my first Lena Album on Shutterfly, I just printed off a couple of dozen digitized pictures and stuck them in one of those cheap little magnetic page photo books that was lying around empty. Yes, I know those albums are terrible, but it was empty and the pages still had stickum on them and that part of the project was actually quick and easy. Every now and then someone stuck a few more photos in the back but I didn't keep it up.

So now it's Halloween again and we were flipping through the album to see just when we bought that first giant inflatable pumpkin (2005 apparently! Those things used to last so much longer than the ones they make today!). But the pictures were falling out like autumn leaves, and Richard was sad that the book stopped in 2017. So I said, no problem, I'll just stick those pictures back down and add a few more. Yep. I spent most of yesterday working on that, and now most of today, and somehow I'm just further from the finish line. 

First off, why don't I just throw away that nasty old album and start over? Well, for one thing, while half of the old photos are falling out, the other half are welded to the pages and I don't want to wreck them by trying to pry them out. But mostly because Richard loved this album so much that he created this hand-painted cover for it, which is also welded to the front cover and it would take a Renaissance painting restoration artist to remove it intact.



So I just tacked down the loose pictures and removed the detached plastic covers and everything was going  fine until I noticed that I was missing pictures for a couple of years. So I printed them out and replaced a few redundant photos and shifted things around, and it took a little longer than expected but not THAT long. Then I got to 2015, which had 3 pages of pictures taken by a random photographer who happened by, took pictures and sent us copies. His camera was better than mine so they look nice, but none of them really record the display the way we would do it. Mostly cute pictures of us posed in front of the pumpkins. So I removed most of those to make room for  more recent pictures. 

I have a fairly nice printer, good enough for scrapbooking anyway, so I thought I'd just print out some photos and stick them in. But the Halloween pictures turned out to be scattered all over the place, and it took most of yesterday to gather them into one Google Photos album. But now there are about 100 photos in that album, so I had to sort through them and pick out a dozen or so to print. That took a large part of yesterday. 

So today I was finally ready to start printing them. But to do that I have to download them to my computer and rename them so they appear in the right order for sorting them into groups for multipage printing. At which point I notice that 4 of the photos are in that dreadful Apple format (HEIC) that is incompatible with everything. No problem, I have a little converter app somewhere that can handle HEIC. But where did it go? I can't find it anywhere? I downloaded it just last year from the Microsoft Store, but it's vanished from my computer. Also from the Microsoft Store. WTF?? Did Microsoft DELETE AN APP FROM MY COMPUTER because they no longer support it??  I don't know, but iMazing is still out there and still has the free download on their site, so I downloaded and installed it and converted the nonconformist pictures. Okay, now I have a nice ordered set of pictures. But somehow the number has grown to 19, which clearly isn't going to fit in the 5 empty pages at the end of this album. sigh  

Well, I do have another empty 8.5x11 album, this one of nice scrapbooking quality. I guess I'll start a Volume 2. Where do I start? I guess print out one year at a time and stick them in the old album until I run out of space and then think about Volume 2. And so it goes.