Stephanie’s Mom happened to be visiting us during Mother’s Day in France (La Fête des Mères), so we celebrated with a lovely brunch at Olea, just around the corner from our apartment.

It’s one thing to put together a photo book.

It’s a whole ‘nother thing to rewrite the program that builds the book to increase the margins and add a gutter, to go through a year’s worth of photos (over 6,000) and narrow them down to about 100, to crop and resize each and every one, to lay out the book so that the pictures on the left relate to the pictures on the right, to add 80 captions in English that are descriptive, yet flow, and then do the same thing over again in French, to summon any remaining creativity to come up with a cover that uniquely identifies the year, and to get this all done in time to get the book printed, shipped, and mailed out to family here and in France in time for Christmas. Well, almost in time.

It might sound like I’m complaining, but really I love it. I love the challenge of a project that absorbs me for more than a few days. That involves building a tool and then using it. That is both analytical and visual.

We started putting these together in 2007 because coincidentally, that year was the first time I traveled to France with Stephanie (not to mention the first time she’d been back in almost 3 years), and it was also the year we went to Buffalo to celebrate my Grandfather’s 90th birthday. We don’t see our family as often as we’d like, specifically our grandparents, so we envisioned this as a way to share ourselves with them that did not require a computer or the internet.

Between then and now however, the inevitable happened. In 2008 one of Stephanie’s Grandmothers passed away, and just this year, I lost my Grandfather. We’re getting our photo books back. I hadn’t really quite anticipated that part. At least not so soon. Both Stephanie and I now have a single surviving grandparent, our maternal Grandmothers.

Between then and now, another change happened. In 2007, our siblings were just our younger siblings, and we didn’t really think a book of photos of us would really mean all that much to them. But now Stephanie’s niece is two and a half, my brother is married, and just like with our Grandparents, we don’t see them as often as we’d like. So the photo book becomes a little piece of ourselves we can leave behind. Something they can easily pull off the shelf when someone we’ve never met asks about us and say, “Yep, that’s my crazy brother” or “Eh oui, ça c’est ma sœur”. At least that’s my fantasy.

Update: my photo-book code is available on GitHub.

Matthew spent Christmas with Beth’s family this year, so we spent the night at their house to ring in the New Year and celebrate a more complete, albeit belated, Christmas with them.

My mom was giddy this morning. “Can I check something on your laptop?” she asked.

“Umm sure…”

A few seconds later she passed it back to me and told me to read this: Gnomes … traveling through time.

I scrolled down, not really sure what I was looking at, or what I was supposed to be looking at. Then I see a photo. Looking closer, one of the photos in the photo looked like toddler-Justin. Actually all of them were. Pictures of me wearing the overalls that my mom had embroidered with gnomes.

Speaking of clothes embroidered-by-Mom, you might recall my Hot & Spicy apron, previously seen here and here.

We wish everyone a happy holidays and a wonderful new year.