Gladys Kravitz.

As you all probably know, I take a lot of photos.  An absurd amount of photos, in fact.  I have shot over 118,000 on my current DSLR camera and 179,000 on my previous one, so we're creeping up on 300,000 images.  And that count doesn't even include all that I've shot with my iPhone, which is a lot, too.

 I've always struggled to keep everything organized.  I save it all on multiple external hard drives, so it's all there somewhere.  Where exactly?  I couldn't tell you; it's a mess.


The one (and only) good thing about my photo disorganization is that I forget what I have, so when I go digging into the archives, I'm often pleasantly surprised when I find photos I don't recall taking.

Like this one.



And this one.




When I stumbled on these pictures I laughed so loudly I woke Charlene and Wylla, who were sound asleep on the couch. Wylla jumped to her feet with a "WHAT? What just happened?" expression on her face.

When I explained that I was laughing at photos of her, she glared for a moment, stretched, circled twice and curled back into a ball with her nose tucked into her tail. Before she closed her eyes, she flicked her tail a few times and let out a big sigh.

"You woke me up for THAT?"

I had forgotten about the moment captured in the photos. In the images that followed, the Von Tussles were on the other side of the gate. Quarantine was up, but I wasn't ready to have all six babies bouncing around the house, so they stayed in their room with a baby gate in the door. Charlene and Wylla were allowed in the room, but for their own sanity, both seemed to prefer to have this barrier between them and the kittens.  Wylla didn't need to be in there, she just needed to know what was going on.   She's always been the nosy neighbor.  She's our little Gladys Kravitz.


I'm trying to get my photos organized, delete some blurry and unsalvageable ones, and just make sense of the big mess. Should I unearth some gems in the process, I'll be sure to share them.