Indiana is in a drought right now. Many other states are as well, but I don’t live there, so I haven’t read their news.  Houses have been catching fire all over the place. There have been grass fires, watering restrictions, and now watering bans.

We’ve been thinking about what would happen if our house caught fire when we were away (like at church or something). We looked at our “things” and thought about what is replaceable and what isn’t. As I look around my house, there are obvious things like my wife’s jewelry and other keepsakes, but the number one thing we determined is irreplaceable is our photo collection.

So today I have decided to do something about that.  I did research a few years ago into companies that digitize your old photos, and they charge through the nose.  I know when my Uncle Danny died in 1996 I had one of my wedding photos of him digitized so we could print out a bigger version, and that process cost me around $75.  I could do that today (with my own scanner/printer and editing software) for less than a dollar (mostly for ink).

This is one of the photos I’ve scanned this morning. Notice the 20 year old in the blue shirt. That’s me the last time I wasn’t fat.

I looked today to see what the cost of this service would be, and one website said you send in your photos in a box, and they will scan all of them for $225.  I figure I could probably get 1000 photos into the box, meaning they would be charging me .23 per photo.  It takes my scanner approximately one minute to scan one photo.  That means that it would take me 17 hours to scan in these 1000 photos.  I’ll do it myself and save the money. I should pay myself the $13.50 per hour to do it, though.