WOO HOO! My niece Sirkka solved my journals’-preservation dilemma!
She told me there are scanning apps available that turn written journals into PDF files so they can be saved in Dropbox or on my PC.
So, I got Genius Scan and tried it out. I was able to scan and save four (4!) volumes of my journals in about an hour. So, I’ll dedicate myself to doing that until all of my written journals are preserved. Then I can burn or trash the originals, since I won’t be taking them to Costa Rica when I move in September.
If I do four journals per hour, it will only take a little over 60 hours to do 180 journals. (Did I do the math right, here??? I’m terrible with math!) I have somewhere between 175 and 185 journals to scan. On many of them, I will be able to scan two pages per image, thereby reducing the page counts by half.
Update:
I’ve scanned and saved ten journals already. I still have quite a way to go, though. Here are images of the journals I still have to do:
Yeah, there are a bunch of them — some slim, some thick. It’s going to be quite the project! I hope Dropbox can contain all of it! If not, I can back it up to the cloud.
So, my marching orders are cut out for me. I plan to dedicate two hours (minimum) every day to the task. I’ve been coloring mandalas and critter books that many hours each night, so I’ll do this instead to wind down just before going to bed, and do as many more during the day as I feel like doing. I want to watch this stack dwindle by the week. I’ll keep taking pix so you can follow the progress I’m making. Won’t THAT be fun? (NOT!) I may need some encouragement to keep on keeping on!
My journal keeping started in 1996; I’m already up to Feb 3, ’74 in the ten volumes I’ve preserved so far
Sirkka seriously encouraged me to do this. She says when I get to Costa Rica I might decide to write an autobiography during some of my spare time, and my journals can help jog my memory.
What little I’ve seen in them while scanning the pages has confirmed that. In them (just so far!) are two notes from Mom: one when I was in a play in high school, the other a note of sorrow when McGovern resoundingly lost his race for the presidency (against Richard Nixon, of all people! Talk about deja vu this past Nov. 5th when a public servant lost to a convicted felon and sexual assailant!) after I campaigned for him so hard, and other precious stuff.
The one below was in response to what George McGovern said after losing in a landslide to Nixon, which was, “It hurts too much to laugh and I’m too old to cry.”
*sigh*
It made me cry all over again!!!
And…oh my gosh… there are sooo many places in these journals that scream “neurodivergent” and “transgender,” even though I didn’t know the terms for them back then (if they were even devised yet). It’s just amazing… but hardly surprising (at least to me).
It’s going to be quite the revelation, in retrospect, as I go through the PDFs when they’re all done and separate the wheat from the chaff… I do feel an autobiography bubbling up in my spirit! We’ll see how long that lasts!
