I went out to pick up a photo album or scrapbook today and came home $115 in purchases later. It's OK, I reasoned, since part of my birthday present from Mom and Dad was a check. So that's what I spend it on.

The final count: Two scrapbooks, two different photo albums, 500 self-stick photo squares, a set of make-your-own postcards, a silvery-gray pen for writing on dark paper, and two packages of plastic negative sleeves (25 pages in each). I realized over the weekend that too many of the photographs I've taken are sitting in boxes and not enough are displayed in albums and frames. I don't really have great places to display frames, but I will in the apartment in November. So I went home from Treasure Island and Monmouth Camera and went upstairs to watch my tapes of last week's TV shows ("That 70s Show," "Spin City," "Drew Carey") and go through my photo boxes.

My problem is that I'll go through phases of shooting. I'll not touch the camera for a couple of weeks, then go nuts, developing maybe a dozen rolls over two or three weeks. And with so many newly developed pictures in envelopes, they pile up. So then months go by, and I've got two dozen envelopes to go through and remove the negatives to place into sleeves. And then there's the matter of putting the prints in albums or scrapbooks.

The pictures from the Seattle trip and from my D.C. weekend must go in scrapbooks, because they involve souvenirs other than photos -- maps and brochures and such things. Then there are all the other various photo memories not extensive enough for their own books that must be put together and displayed somewhere. So that's when an album contains pictures from a span of months. There are pictures from Elise's farm in Maine, various parties and picnics, short outings here and there. I've also got my New Jersey album, into which I'm putting nothing but pictures shot here in the great Garden State. Many of them are from the various minor league ballparks and several autumn leaf-peeping outings. It's a laborious process to be sure, but one that I'm sure will provide easy access to pleasant memories in the future.

I spent much of the afternoon going through all kinds of various pictures of younger days -- very few of which I took. They're photos taken by Mom and Dad of Jess and me as little children, of cousins and uncles and grandparents. There are a few I took with my first camera, one of those Kodak disk jobbers that produced tiny square prints of rather horrible quality. I looked at a few Halloween costumes, all kinds of Christmas gatherings, the trip to Florida in 1982 (before Epcot was even open), several summer and one winter trip to Maine, and about 10 or 12 pictures of the cats -- Frisky and Oreo, back when the latter looked tiny and thin.

I know that someday, when I'm in my 40s and a husband and father, I'll look at the albums stacked up on the shelves of a bookcase in my study/library/office and be glad I made photography my hobby. My kids will look through them and laugh at Dad and Aunt Jessica when they were young; they'll see Grandma and Grandpa as young parents; they'll know the house I grew up in. They'll probably look through them with their friends, laughing at how silly my Superman Halloween costume looked or rolling on the floor in hysterical convulsions over my mangy mess of wild dark red hair.

Whee -- I love the realization of making memories and comprehending it at the moment.