New Beginnings: Kim, Kris & Irene.

What a Weekend!


Kim & Kris got hitched and Irene got spawned in the Eastern Caribbean. The Monday morning news editors are jockeying to give both stories the visibility they deserve, and while there's a shortage of data to predict the future of Hurricane Irene and its potential affect on the U.S. mainland, there's plenty of information (and more to come) about the Kim Kardashian/Kris Humphries wedding.


When you're a star on reality TV or a professional basketball player, everything you do--good and bad--is documented on film, videotape, and in print. No so for the rest of us. We have our favorite photographs and some video of our kids and grandchildren growing up, but our entire collection of video doesn't get close to the amount of  video taken from multiple angles of the Kardashian-Humphries gala affair. 


Imagine, the images from your kids' lifetime don't add up to those of an evening of a lifetime. More important, when there's huge commercial value to your video, there's a plan to take care of those images so that they're protected from loss. With Irene swirling in the Caribbean this week, they'll be plenty of heartbroken people who lose lots, including their family's wedding photographs, as wind and floods invade the security of their homes. 


As you make a plan, build a kit, and stay informed in anticipation of a natural disaster, give some thought to how and what photos, video, color slides, and documents you want to protect . . . . unless your last name is Kardashian or Humphries. Then you can let others do it for you. If you're on your own though, check out our Important Things Index or the EvacuPacket, a Do-It-Yourself kit. If you decide to buy one, commemorate the first hurricane of the 2011 season and use coupon code ZCBA3B to save $10.00.


Have a memorable day!

Disaster Preparedness: Another Reminder

Tornadoes and floods devastated hundreds of thousands of acres this spring with more devastation sure to come as the crest of the Mississippi moves down river at record levels to Louisiana during the next couple of weeks. 

Damage from this extraordinary weather leaves television news commentators searching for new adjectives to describe the destruction, yet words can never convey the damage, personal, and communal grief like the photos and video images that they broadcast. 

Images are very powerful communicators.  While its nice that we can use Facebook to post images of found photographs to try to reunite an owner and his/her photos, it's safer and more reliable to care about our own legacy by creating digital files of our favorite photographs, color slides, and important documents, and storing them in a safe place, like the cloud. You can learn more at OurHeritageVault.com. 


Kimberly Lankford, Contributing Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, offer some very good advice about disaster preparedness for the upcoming hurricane season and other calamities on the Kiplinger web site.