Day 06 → What Tickles My Fancy
This is why I didn't post yesterday.
I spent Saturday afternoon helping my sister burn pictures of her recent trip to Thailand onto a CD so that she could show them to people using her DVD player and television set.
It did not go entirely smoothly.
Part of the problem was that she had travelled with a friend, who also took pictures on her digital camera, and this friend had stayed an extra week in Asia. M__ (my sister) is not very tech-savvy, so when she first got back I walked her through how to upload pictures from her camera, how to manipulate them with the software so that they were cropped, lightened, etc. and also saved them very carefully with numbers and descriptive names, so that they would stay in order. There were 196 photographs she deemed worthy of keeping. Afterwards we e-mailed them to M__'s own e-mail account so that a) they were saved in another place in case of disaster and b) so that if she wanted to, she could show them to other people, who were on her e-mail list. About a week later S__ was back from Asia, and sent M__ her pictures as well. She had over 200 individual shots.
M__ wanted all the pictures to be in order for the CD, and so spent several days carefully re-e-mailing them to herself, slotting S___'s pictures between her own (not how I would have approached the problem, but what can you do?). She thought I could just grab them one by one and throw them onto the disk and they would all be in order, but of course this is not how things like this work - I had to save each one of them, renumbered, to a file and then burn them to a disc. This is where I goofed up.
M___ uses G-Mail, and when you send pictures through G-Mail it shows you the individual photos in the e-mail containing them. I idiotically saved each photo as I saw it on the screen into a folder on my computer, afterwards burning them to a disc, which we then put into my DVD player to see if it worked. The pictures were tiny. That's right folks, I had stupidly saved a bunch of thumbnails.
I apologized profusely, and started going through the e-mails again, actually opening the pictures and saving them properly. M__, not surprisingly, was getting bored during this process. I should mention at this point that M__ is a Virgo.
When a Virgo gets bored, a strange and wonderful thing happens.
They start to clean.
She announced that she was just going to wash up the breakfast dishes, and the next thing I knew, she was asking for a scouring pad and Ajax to clean the sink with. I was busy and not giving her activities my full attention, but I did tell her a couple of times she didn't need to clean - she could watch something on TV if she was bored - but she claimed she was working off nervous energy. She ended up scrubbing the stove, kitchen countertops, the walls, small appliances and wiped out the refrigerator. Then she swept all the floors, and went into the bathroom with a scrubby. By the time I had finished re-saving the pictures, the only things she hadn't done were to wash the floors, vacuum, dust (she couldn't believe I don't own a feather duster) and re-organize my underwear drawer. All this took less than 90 minutes. I went into the bathroom and was nearly blinded by the gleam.
I told her I could rent her out to friends.
Please note the place wasn't that bad - definitely not what you'd call dirty - but she works miracles with a scrubby. It would have taken me twice as long to even approach the level of shininess M__ achieved.
I burned another CD and it worked perfectly this time. M__ was happy, and I had the place clean and shiny.