zzzzZZZZzzzz
Tiredness, I AM it. Gah.
Monday night, I was up late working on my Idol Survivor entry. There was a 51-hour turnaround this week, and I think I had the start of an idea on Sunday night? (Sunday is a little fuzzy at the moment) I definitely got sleepy early on Sunday, so I went to bed but then it took me 2 hours to fall asleep. \o?
On Monday, I did a LOT of work on it all the way up through 3 a.m., plus a quick follow-up detour back to the PC to jot down a key subsection that helped tie in the original idea. In bed at 3:30 a.m. Solid re-ordering, editing, and completion on Tuesday, and I finished posting it 2 minutes before the deadline. Yaaaay! I'm pleased with how it turned out, and there are lots of fun details in it. It's linked off the poll here. Please read and vote if you can-every vote helps toward Individual Immunity!
So, what happened Tuesday night, then? Well, there was catching up on WORK-work after a day spent mostly writing, and also... This last weekend, I really dived into trying to make sense out of all the stray personal photos, school photos, and sports photos dating back from when I got my first digital camera. Which was approximately 18 years ago. (Kill me...) :O
Cue rant: I used to have a whole system for putting things in photo albums and saving the negatives and the extras, and that worked great for years. Then the kids started playing basketball and soccer, and we began accumulating those hard cardboard sets that combine a team photo and a separate picture of your child athlete, plus extra solo photos. Those don't really fit in a photo album, so they just became a pile. :( Along with those large packages of yearly school photos, where there are always extras, often in awkward sizes. Ugh.
With the digital camera... the perfect ultimately became the enemy of the good. Because you can edit photos (to adjust framing and lighting, and to remove red-eye), you will. Obsessively. (Or maybe that's just me?) You transfer a bunch of pictures off the camera, edit them, delete the "duds", and free up the camera card for more images. But by the time you're done with all that, there are more pictures on the camera waiting for you. Instead of finishing a roll of film and taking it in to be developed, you have an eternal feed! \o?
I was a few years into that cycle when my PC's hard-drive died, taking a whole bunch of pictures with it that had no backups. The hard-drive was unrecoverable-what a blow. All I had were "highlights" I'd reprinted for the kids' grandparents and whatever was on our daughter's camera (she was only 11, so not great stuff). The backlog of unreviewed/unedited stuff became enormous (and still unprinted). My digital camera eventually became a black hole for batteries, so I got a new one... where all the images were too big for my PC's photo editor. I had to convert each one to a smaller number of pixels before I could edit it, and do you see where this is going? And that's just the stuff in digital form!
Bring it on home: So last weekend, I gathered all of the "unprocessed" or unorganized physical photos from the various piles/boxes/what-not where HalfshellHusband and I had stored them these last 18 years, and tried to at least pre-organize them. There were scattered photos from HSH's childhood, which are now all in the same Ziploc bag to be dealt with later. I amassed early "un-albumed" kid photos into a group, mostly by date, and collected random school photos of nieces and nephews into a common envelope. I decided I could make a standalone album with the kids' large school photos for each year, and separated those out along with the sports photos and Girl Scout Camp photos. Then I realized I was missing some years of school photos, and repeatedly searched through the house and the filing cabinets in the home-office and garage looking for them. Mega-flail!
Then HSH announced that the housecleaner was coming today, which meant I needed to square away the large living room quantity of assorted mid-project crap beforehand. And while putting a few things away, I found the missing school photos as well as more sports photos! SOooo I was up until 3 a.m. again last night, sorting those "irregulars" by child and type, putting them in folders for later, and then temporarily boxing stuff up in such a way that come next weekend, I'll be able to remember what I was doing.
I feel exhausted just explaining all that. /o\
And do you know what I still have no plan for? All of the sweet school "project" mementos and such that are too big to fit in a file folder. Some are huge! WTF do I do about those?
Monday night, I was up late working on my Idol Survivor entry. There was a 51-hour turnaround this week, and I think I had the start of an idea on Sunday night? (Sunday is a little fuzzy at the moment) I definitely got sleepy early on Sunday, so I went to bed but then it took me 2 hours to fall asleep. \o?
On Monday, I did a LOT of work on it all the way up through 3 a.m., plus a quick follow-up detour back to the PC to jot down a key subsection that helped tie in the original idea. In bed at 3:30 a.m. Solid re-ordering, editing, and completion on Tuesday, and I finished posting it 2 minutes before the deadline. Yaaaay! I'm pleased with how it turned out, and there are lots of fun details in it. It's linked off the poll here. Please read and vote if you can-every vote helps toward Individual Immunity!
So, what happened Tuesday night, then? Well, there was catching up on WORK-work after a day spent mostly writing, and also... This last weekend, I really dived into trying to make sense out of all the stray personal photos, school photos, and sports photos dating back from when I got my first digital camera. Which was approximately 18 years ago. (Kill me...) :O
Cue rant: I used to have a whole system for putting things in photo albums and saving the negatives and the extras, and that worked great for years. Then the kids started playing basketball and soccer, and we began accumulating those hard cardboard sets that combine a team photo and a separate picture of your child athlete, plus extra solo photos. Those don't really fit in a photo album, so they just became a pile. :( Along with those large packages of yearly school photos, where there are always extras, often in awkward sizes. Ugh.
With the digital camera... the perfect ultimately became the enemy of the good. Because you can edit photos (to adjust framing and lighting, and to remove red-eye), you will. Obsessively. (Or maybe that's just me?) You transfer a bunch of pictures off the camera, edit them, delete the "duds", and free up the camera card for more images. But by the time you're done with all that, there are more pictures on the camera waiting for you. Instead of finishing a roll of film and taking it in to be developed, you have an eternal feed! \o?
I was a few years into that cycle when my PC's hard-drive died, taking a whole bunch of pictures with it that had no backups. The hard-drive was unrecoverable-what a blow. All I had were "highlights" I'd reprinted for the kids' grandparents and whatever was on our daughter's camera (she was only 11, so not great stuff). The backlog of unreviewed/unedited stuff became enormous (and still unprinted). My digital camera eventually became a black hole for batteries, so I got a new one... where all the images were too big for my PC's photo editor. I had to convert each one to a smaller number of pixels before I could edit it, and do you see where this is going? And that's just the stuff in digital form!
Bring it on home: So last weekend, I gathered all of the "unprocessed" or unorganized physical photos from the various piles/boxes/what-not where HalfshellHusband and I had stored them these last 18 years, and tried to at least pre-organize them. There were scattered photos from HSH's childhood, which are now all in the same Ziploc bag to be dealt with later. I amassed early "un-albumed" kid photos into a group, mostly by date, and collected random school photos of nieces and nephews into a common envelope. I decided I could make a standalone album with the kids' large school photos for each year, and separated those out along with the sports photos and Girl Scout Camp photos. Then I realized I was missing some years of school photos, and repeatedly searched through the house and the filing cabinets in the home-office and garage looking for them. Mega-flail!
Then HSH announced that the housecleaner was coming today, which meant I needed to square away the large living room quantity of assorted mid-project crap beforehand. And while putting a few things away, I found the missing school photos as well as more sports photos! SOooo I was up until 3 a.m. again last night, sorting those "irregulars" by child and type, putting them in folders for later, and then temporarily boxing stuff up in such a way that come next weekend, I'll be able to remember what I was doing.
I feel exhausted just explaining all that. /o\
And do you know what I still have no plan for? All of the sweet school "project" mementos and such that are too big to fit in a file folder. Some are huge! WTF do I do about those?