Scanning the gratitudes and the memories

      There are "projects" with the computer -- the Internet, Google, etc. -- that keep me busy, or motivated, or maybe taking up time.
      They are fun, or least I think so, and in the future, they might meaningful to some other people.
      Let's start with the work of the past week or so -- scanning in pages of my gratitude journal from 2012 and 2013.
      This is the seventh year I have written gratitudes,  picking one or two positives from each day. Beatrice has done this for a couple of decades, and she and our daughter Rachel suggested I do so, especially as I was about to start this blog in January 2012. 
     By then, I was semi-retired, working only parttime in sports, the first few days of that year for The Dallas Morning News and then returning for my last year of work with the home team, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
     My gratitudes from that year are about some of the work days and assignments.  
     Anyway, it's been a wonderful exercise, a moment each day to reflect on life.  
     For the past four-plus years, I have kept the gratitudes in (black-covered) journals. But here's the catch: The first two years, I did not. In 2012, I brilliantly (yes, that's sarcastic) kept my posts on a page-a-day notepad, each with a Sudoku puzzle. In 2013, I used a yellow-paged notebook.
     So ... because one of my projects has been to take my stack of newspaper clippings, some letters and other written material and scan them into the computer for future reference. More importantly, it helps rid us of paper we've carried through every move to a new residence (lots of moves in 40 years of marriage). 
      We are trying to downsize, consolidate, lighten our paper load. We have worked at that for a decade.
      Instead of carrying 312 paper-clipped-together pages by months -- six sheets a week (Saturdays and Sundays were on one page together) -- they are being scanned into the computer one by one, then cropped to the right size and dropped into one file folder: "2012 gratitude journal."
      It is not a quick process. And I have the 2013 notebook -- 84 6x9 pages back and front -- for future scanning.
      So those two years will be in the computer hard drive, and someday Jason and/or Rachel and the grandkids might want to take a look. They're mentioned a few times.
      Fun, and sometimes agonizing (family members and friends' deaths), to read back over the gratitudes. Many posts are about the grandchildren -- Josie was 4, Jacob 2 and Kaden 10 months as the year started. No Eli yet.
      In 2012, we went to Baton Rouge for Emily and our nephew Josh's wedding (they just had their first child, Ella Rose), and we brought Josie home with us to spend a week, then drove her back home to Knoxville. So that's about two weeks' worth of blog posts.
      In 2013, two weeks' worth of posts about our trip to The Netherlands. Great memories of "home" for me.
      Examples of those 2012 pages: two days in February. The subjects -- Dr. James C. Farrar and Trey Prather -- were well known to my set of friends from Shreveport and North Louisiana.         
     The gratitudes are just one small part of the days. There is the daily walk, the yoga/stretching classes three or four days a week at the downtown YMCA, lots of reading (computer stories, books, magazines), not as much TV watching as in the past (not even sports events), helping Bea with the household chores (I get in my 15 percent), the once-a-day coffee/one chocolate square fix, and lately mixing the ingredients for the smoothies from our new Ninja blender. 
      Spent much time for more than a year now researching material on the computer on Shreveport/North Louisiana pro baseball history -- teams and players.
      A book on the subject was suggested to me by someone. I don't know if that will happen, but I will have a pretty solid history of events and people available to those who want it. About 85 percent done on research.
      There is also research for my blog topics, and for a few weeks, I researched -- with the help of newspapers.com -- football lettermen/participants at Louisiana Tech University. Because I noticed in its football media guides that the lists there had much missing information and some names that I was not sure belonged (the Tech sports information people were alerted to this, so I received their permission to work on it).
      Another project: Updating the Louisiana high school track and field champions' list -- team and individual/relay events -- from 1985 on. The late Jerry Byrd's book on track and field in the state has the lists through 1984. 
      Yet another one: A list of Louisiana state champions in American Legion baseball, with results of the state finals' games.
       (I know that much of this is in "who cares" department. But I care, and it's busy work, so ...)
       As I research, I keep stopping to clip photos and stories about people and events that I think might interest them because many people do like nostalgia. Post some of those on Facebook; send some out by e-mail.
         So anyway, there is gratitude for having time to do this. Meanwhile, I will be -- to twist a sportswriting phrase -- scanning to daylight.