Eventually it will get done.

I like the idea of artistic arcs. Just like TV series that have episodes that resolve the plot in one hour, but have another ongoing plot that is referred to as the 'seasonal arc' to keep viewers tuning in. In fact, some TV shows have the all-encompassing series arc, where the final strand of the plot is not woven in until the final episode of the series. Which can feel complete and satisfying ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") or can really frustrate and confuse ("Seinfeld", and depending on your mindset, "The Sopranos"). So, in my own 'creative' projects, I seem to have these varying arcs, like balls juggling in the air. Some projects are done in an hour, or a day, maybe a week. Some are off and on:  a painting I'll return to later, a collage that needs some element but I don't know yet what it is. Other projects are more far-reaching: a quilt block finished, but I only (!) need to make 59 more for a fabulous bed quilt. Wait, maybe I'll just do 25 blocks and turn it into a table runner. Wait, maybe I'll do 12 blocks and turn it into a wall hanging. Hmmmmm, maybe I'll take this one block and put it in an art quilt as an homage to traditional quilting. Maybe I'll glue it on paper and send someone a birthday card. OK, done. And then there are those epic projects that are so huge I can only contemplate one small portion of it at a time or I'll have a mild panic attack. As has happened with my lofty goal to scan and save every photograph from every album in our family history. Now when I started this it seemed like a summer project (summer of 2008 to be exact). Scan, save, scan, save, scan, save, etc. into a nice little virtual file in the sky so that if a tornado ever blew those family albums away those images would not be lost forever. I think I was motivated by Hurricane Katrina where I saw so many desperate people, and so many of them mourning not the loss of clothing and furniture, but of precious family photos gone forever in the flood. So my role as family historian seemed relatively simple, unless........well, it started with the old black and white photos from the 1920's and 30's. I discovered my Corel Photo program, whereby, on my computer, I could  bring up a saved photograph, remove scratches, hide tears, crop badly framed images, brighten dark shadows and darken overlit faces. I could even go Andy Warhol on it, or make it sepia toned, or zoom in on an extreme close-up. It was like a drug. I could 'fix' faded and damaged photos and make them good as new. So now my process became 'scan, fix, save'. Photo by photo. Some were just fine, others took up to half an hour or more to get right. The black and white images from the WWII years held up the best. As did many photos from my childhood in Africa. Then colour came into the picture. We've all seen how those colour photos from the 60's and 70's have faded and washed out. So now on top of fixing damage I was also brightening colour. I was like Paul Simon's cheerful song "Kodachrome". ("They give us the nice bright colours, they give us the greens of summer, make you think all the world's a sunny day..." ). Right now I have finally reached the Seventies. Only three more decades to go. But wait, those are the photo-heavy decades, the ones crammed full of pictures of my children at every age from birth through college and slightly beyond. All my pre-Seventies photos can fit into two albums. From that time onward I have eight overstuffed, giant albums of various milestones of growth, vacations, holidays, school events, staged portraits, and random goofiness. Those albums look awfully daunting. This may be the epic series arc, the one that ends with me on my deathbed reaching for a snappy version of a combo iPad/scanner/TV/music system/phone/camera/microwave/hair dryer and pushing that scan button one last time. Done!