It has happened to all of us. You click on an e-mail to open it and the waiting begins. The little spinning e-mail icon goes around and around. Your patience is running thin. Well, Uncle Pete didn’t really mean to e-mail you a 10-megabyte file; he just didn’t realize the necessity of resizing.

The holidays offer us the opportunity to spend time with the people who mean the most to us. But if you’re anything like me, the idea of braving the local malls doesn’t fill you with anything remotely resembling yuletide cheer.

Unpacking some old boxes in storage, I stumbled on a relic from my childhood: a book by Dr. Seuss entitled My Book About Me. It’s intended for young children and attempts to capture all of the little details of the child’s daily life. The book lets the child be co-author, filling in details from his or her height and weight to the number of steps to the nearest mailbox and all kinds of other facts and trivia. I was happy that my parents had helped me make this record, and it was a blast learning that when I was five, I wanted to grow up to be either a fireman or a magician. I guess editor falls somewhere in between.

Now that archival-quality, large-format prints cost only a few dollars and can be produced quickly, I find myself creating many more prints than I’m able to frame and display. The cost of framing prints hasn’t declined, nor do I have much wall space left in my home to display my newly printed images.