Some Days are Diamonds

Sometimes things just fall into place. And some days seem to be more prone to that than others. Like Dick Feller wrote, "some days are diamonds, some days are stone".

Today a decision about my home movies started to gel. My 8mm films have to be sent out to be digitized. (I no longer own a film projector.) The video tapes (VHS and Video8) were getting to be a problem, though...and not just because I no longer own a VCR.

Twenty-seven years ago when I was paying $15 for blank VHS tapes (more than it cost to fill my Lincoln Continental with gas), I didn't buy separate tapes for home movies and recorded TV. So...I have several tapes that are full of TV programs and movies, with home movie snippets sandwiched in between. I also have several unlabeled tapes (glue got old and label fell off?), and I have no idea what is on them. How do I decide what to send out? And, how many tapes will I pay to have digitized that only yield a couple of minutes of home video?

I came to the conclusion to buy a VCR/DVD recorder combination. The local Walmart has one for $158 (much less than Home Movie Depot would charge me to digitize my VHS tapes). I'll try it out this evening, and if it doesn't do a great job, I will return it tomorrow morning.

Once I made that decision, I went through my DVD spindles to find out how many blanks I have. I found a spindle that contains DVD-Rs of the Video8 tapes! I had forgotten that I already digitized them a few years ago.

It gets better.

On that same spindle was a DVD-R that contains files of three movies, one TV show, six Gloria Estefan videos, and 4 short (under a minute) miscellaneous video clips. One of those clips I had totally forgotten about. Another I thought was lost forever when the external hard drive lost my home movie folder. (Yes...that is Brenda and me on national TV.)

I love it when a plan comes together!