I've been pretty bad about not taking pictures, despite having good cameras pretty much my entire life. I've always had a good memory, so in the past I've just paid close attention and skipped taking photos of everything. However two things are working together to change my photo taking strategy--my memory isn't quite as crisp as it once was and I'm seeing the effects of age on my grandmother.

I've been lucky enough to go to some absolutely amazing places, and I'm usually pretty good about documenting that stuff--I've got plenty of pics from my trips whether they were to exotic destinations like Alaska or just Philadelphia. However, I'm really bad about documenting the day-to-day stuff that makes up the brunt of our lives. I love my life and I'm fully aware of how lucky I am. I love the time I get to spend with my wife and family, my friends and co-workers, and Chloe Bananas. I love getting out to explore the world, whether it's the hummingbird battles in our backyard or Chloe's insistence on carrying lemons that fall off our neighbors tree in her mouth like a ball on walks. The thing I'm trying to say, hopefully without being too bad of a humblebraggart, is that as I get older, I've realized the most important things to remember aren't necessarily the ones that seem the most exceptional. The amazing stuff you squeeze into your day-to-day life matters as much or more.

That's a picture of a moose that I took myself. Someplace crazy, like Alaska. Or maybe Canada. I can't remember, which is the point of this blog post

I realized this when I was talking to my grandmother on Christmas. She's got a form of dementia, which isn't uncommon in people her age, but it prevents her from turning short-term memories into long-term memories. The upshot is that she can tell you with great detail what she was doing in 1944, but she has trouble holding involved conversations and frequently can't remember anything that happened between 2005 and 5 minutes ago. It sucks, but she knew it was coming and has handled it with the same grace and good cheer that she's had as long as I can remember.

This isn't my grandmother, but it's some English ladies in WW2 that I found on Wikipedia

On Christmas afternoon, she was telling Gina some of my grandfather's favorite jokes when my dad had a brilliant idea. He quietly took out his iPhone and just started asking her questions. She filled first Dad's phone and then mine with stories of her youth in England, the Blitz, meeting my grandfather, moving to the US, and more. While some of her stories were about major events--listening to early BBC broadcasts on the radio her brother and dad had built, the Blitz during WW2, and marrying my grandfather, the most interesting were about everyday life in a time before plastics or antibiotics or cheap air travel. Those are the things I want to remember.

That's why I'm going to take lots more pictures this year.Taking a photo a day seems kind of trite at this point, but I do want to try shooting pictures of everything I eat this year--maybe I'll post it on a Tumblr or something.

Of course, shooting more photos raises another problem. How to store, catalog, and organize the 150+GB of photos I've already shot, along with a massive new influx of pics. That's a problem I've got to figure out, but I hope by the end of 2012 to have cataloged the existing jumble of photos I've collected and made sure the metadata attached to them is accurate. Hopefully that will make the giant mess of data I've created actually useful for something.

Books 

• The Windup Girl - You should really, really read this. Set in a post agricultural Thailand, where the oceans have risen, and burning carbon is crazy expensive, The Windup Girl entertained from start to finish.
• The City and the City - An improbable detective story set in an improbably bisected city, unraveling the world is as much fun as unraveling the plot.
• The Name of the Wind - More than a Tolkien knockoff, The  Name of the Wind is a grittier, more real face for swords and sorcery fantasy, and is one of my favorite origin stories ever. This didn't come out in 2010, but the follow-up is due in 2011, I think.
• Bitter Seeds  - The secret history of the war between Allied and Axis warlocks in World War 2?
• Moonfire - This is Norman Mailer's coverage of the Apollo program, specifically Apollo XI,  for Life magazine. It's illustrated by photos from NASA and Life magazine, and put together in an absolutely glorious large format book. You might call it a coffee table book, but it's a gorgeous way to learn about humanity's most amazing journey.

Albums

• Surfer Blood: Astro Coast
• Cee-Lo: The Lady Killer
• Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
• Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion 
• The Bird and the Bee: Reinterpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates
• The National: High Violet
• The Hold Steady: Boys and Girls in America
• She & Him: Volume Two 

Comics/Graphic Novels

• Transmetropolitan - Not new this year, but holy shit I can't believe I'd never read this before 
• Planetary - Yeah, pretty much the same thing. Planetary is the reason that Warren Ellis is a golden god. 
• Superman All Stars - I really like the All-Star idea--to make a series of stories that perfectly represents the character--and the execution is spot on.  

Movies 

• Scott Pilgrim - Yes, Ramona is the worst MPDG ever, but the movie succeeds despite the cliche. It's visually stunning and it scratches me just right as a lover of video games from the 80s and 90s.  Oh yeah, great fight choreography, too.
• Inception - Mind-bending, awesome, and really really beautiful. Hate on this if you want, but I think it's rad. 
• Book of Eli - Yes, I'm a little biased, but in a year when action movies were dumb and predictable, Eli was thought-provoking. 
• Kick-Ass - Really, this is just for the best crazy Nic Cage character ever.   
• Walking Dead - OK, not really a movie, but more awesome than most of the movies I saw this year.

Games

• Enslaved  -  My favorite plot-driven game this year. The characters and story are brilliant, and more than make up for some janky framerate problems.
• Super Meat Boy  -  Meat Boy hits me precisely in the pleasure centers. At first glance it seems like brutally difficult platforming, but then I realized that Super Meat Boy just demands the same level of perfection from the player that it delivers in level design. 
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit - I just really love Criterion racers, and NFS:MW revisits my first NFS franchise with my favorite multiplayer of the year.
• Carcassonne (iPad/iPhone) - Yes! Finally, a perfect implementation of one of my favorite board games, on iPad. Please, I want to see Ticket to Ride, Dominion, Pandemic, and other awesome games with the same perfect mix of pass 'n' play, local multiplayer, and internet multiplayer. Expansions please!
• Mass Effect 2 -  Bioware pushed boundaries in storytelling with ME2 with a massive, broad story full of twists and turns. Because of the dozens of choices I made in this game (and ME1), I feel like I had a very unique playing experience.
• Dead Rising: Case 0 - Better than the full blown game, Case 0 is precisely the amount of Dead Rising I wanted. 
• Rock Band 3 - I love Rock Band and this is really the perfect Rock Band. The only problem? The addition of keyboards has rendered my massive library of songs obsolete.

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• Condoms keep your stuff dry, especially if you double knot them.
• Condoms aren't particularly good to shoot (video) through. They're fuzzy above water, but worked OK below water. 
• I don't think I'd go deeper than a foot or two with a condom on my camera (not a euphemism).
• Lubrication is bad. It's smelly, messy, and isn't good for the lens. The powder in non-lubricated is messy, but wipes off.
• There's not much selection in most drugstores for non-lubricated condoms. 
• Smaller is better than bigger. It's good to minimize the air space.
• There will be a little condensation, especially in cold water. It didn't damage our cameras, but your mileage may vary.
• Sound is weird through the condom, it gets really loud when water is hitting it. Sound through the official case was very muted. Neither is perfect, but the condom actually did a better job, especially underwater.
• It's hard not to laugh when you're spraying someone in the face with a hose.
• I feel like the condom probably is a safer way to pack things when they might be submerged than a ziplock or other plastic bag is. The knot was impervious, and the condoms sturdy.