What are you Thankful for?

Thanksgiving has come and gone and the run up to Christmas is in full swing. Despite the urgings to stop and give thanks, is Thanksgiving is becoming just another day to shop on line? Black Friday has already turned into a month-long event.

In the midst of the holiday preparations, our basement clean-out is ongoing. So far, we have found a number of precious items: among them, six home video tapes, including the missing wedding tape, if the labels are accurate! Along with the slides we found, those tapes have gone to Forever for digitizing, and we should be able to share the results with the family at Christmas! We have also found a lot of junk and much of it has been donated (roller skates and vintage Tupperware) or sent to the trash heap (broken blinds and pieces of carpet). The basement is already looking a lot better! 

The question that we keep asking ourselves is, "Why did we keep all this stuff?" I think part of the answer is we didn't actually keep it, we just didn't throw it away. There is a difference. When our daughter moved into her first home in 2008, she parked a bunch of furniture and boxes in our basement as a temporary measure. As of a week ago, those items have finally gone, and most of them were donated or trashed. The things that have kept their value, after all these years, are the photos and videos. 

In the Forever community, there is something called, "The Messy Box". Nearly everyone I talk to has one: a box of old photos, videos, film reels in their basement or attic. Of course, those are the very worst places to keep them as temperature and moisture will destroy most kinds of media. In many cases, the boxes sit unopened from the day they were brought home, after grandma died or elderly parents went into assisted living. It's hard to throw these things away when our loved ones kept them for so many years but as time goes by, we remember less and less about the people and events that they show. 

Forever is a solution, and a pretty complete one at that.  As well as digitization of your memories, they will sell you permanent, private cloud storage, which is guaranteed for your lifetime plus 100 years. That means, when you are gone, those memories will be passed on to whomever you designate! In the meantime, the Forever app allows you to share your pictures on your cell phone or stream them on a TV (using an Amazon Fire Stick). You can make notes about the photos in the description section and tag them for easy searching.

And no one has to store the messy box!