Well, it is done.

How anti-climactic. There ought to be horns blaring, drums blazing (preferably lots of drums, since I have a weakness for those), angels singing, tall towers collapsing on minions. You get the drift.

After years of slaving away on a spreadsheet that just wasn't getting the job done, I finally figured out how to index my collection using Windows Vista Photo Gallery.

All the items in my collection are now catalogued in an orderly fashion, bad photographs have been culled, duplicates nixed, and I now have at my very fingertips  a photo file of some 13,000-plus images of my Lord of the Rings movie collection. (This doesn't include my clippings collection, which is separate.)

I worked on this at home, at my desk at work, on the coffee table, sitting on the floor, riding in to work with my Mom when my own mom-van broke down.  Oh, my aching back. And we won't even talk about the carpal tunnel brought on by cutting, copying and pasting all those many photos.

Things occurred to me during this process that I had never really thought about before......American popcorn buckets are cardboard.  Canadian ones are plastic.  Americans are the only people who use popcorn bags (although Germans use similar bags for candy). Everyone else uses those popout cardboard things.  

Why didn't the Danbury Mint movie dolls do well?  I mean, the Danbury Galadriel was simply glorious!!!!! Was she a prototype? What happened to the rest of the series?  For that matter, why not ROTK Kelloggs cards?  Why no FOTR Taiwanese 3d set? Why are the Hungarians so hung up on memory cards? The best magazines were the French ones, the best posters, Thai and the best 3d were inarguably Taiwanese.  The best at everything, the Japanese, of course.  Why did the US drop the ball so badly on promo items? I mean, c'mon! Poptarts and Pringles. Forgive me, but   *yawn*

Anyway, the Augean task is done, and I am so very relieved.