Darla and I took today and ran around, just enjoying the nice weather and beautiful colors fall has given us. We took the Big Green Jeep and headed toward Eureka for some breakfast and roaming through antique shops.

I enjoy running around in the antique shops, looking at all the old stuff. Today, I saw all kinds of old cameras, which was pretty cool. I really dig seeing the old hardware, and keep thinking that one of these days, I’ll put some up on the walls of my office.

However, I kinda got philosophical as I passed by dozens and dozens of family portraits and old yearbooks. One of my big pushes has been preserving family history, and it struck me that there was a ton of history being lost, one antique store at a time. Even if you were to pick up every old family photo out there, there’s no good way to tie those to anyone in particular. At least with the yearbooks, you’d have some idea of who the folks were. However, I suspect a lot of yearbooks fall off the edge of the planet before any preservation is done… garage sales, estate sales, trash bins.

I made a dent in some of that loss this week by scanning my old junior high yearbooks (posted on the Central High site I run). Got a few raves from my old classmates over that, and they have challenged me to scan our old school newspapers from high school. I think that’ll be the next project….