Category Archives: doing it wrong

I have started an online tutorial for an Adobe product at least a half dozen times. This weekend I thought I’d do the Photoshop one and finish it this time. 15 hours. If I did 3 hours a day (I took the day off THU as well) I could do the whole thing.

I am delusional because I worked at it very hard every day and I finished one hour a day. And my poor brain is full. I had to stop to try the various things and I repeated several sections. I enjoyed the work I did but I am a slow learner.

I’m really going to try to finish the entire course this time, ideally before the next version of the software comes out. Wish me luck.

In other news, I thought I’d try to buy some pants online again and met with total failure. I buy almost everything from the same store. I went through everything in my closet and tried it all on, made sure I still like how it fit, checked the size. They were all the same size.

It didn’t feel overly optimistic that I could buy from the website and be successful.

Nope. Three different styles. None fit. Now I’m not sure if I’m going to take the stuff to the store and see if I can find stuff that fits or just send it all back and wear my same old clothes until they disintegrate.

There was a post card in the box from the CEO thanking me for my loyalty and inviting me to share any thoughts I had with her via email. I was not delusional here. I knew there was no way this lady was responding to customer emails but I sent a note anyway begging for consistency in sizing.

The autoresponder thanked me and let me know she forwarded my email to the customer service team. How much you want to bet I get boilerplate instructions on how to return the clothes that didn’t fit.

This one came out of the iPhone after some sort of special effects sweetener. Took both photos from the ferry.

You know how some kinds of old plastic get this smell like stinky feet? We had a Coleman cooler that still worked great but holymotherofstinkbombs. No amount of white vinegar or Athlete’s foot powder did any good and we finally got rid of it.

I have my basil on the windowsill planted in an old plastic pot and it smells like feet. Every time I stand in front of the kitchen sink I smell feet. The basil never took off and looks wilty. I think the potting soil keeps it too damp. I need to grind it up with some garlic and pine nuts so we can all feel better about its place in the world.

This is the Clink, home of the Seattle Sounders and Seahawks. I’ll let them duke it out who gets top billing.

I’m so far behind on my stories. I keep finding more notes with something that I want to post about.

Last weekend we were in Seattle and if you’d never been there before and that was your only visit you’d be convinced the place is magical. Perfect weather. Clear skies. We took the ferry to Bainbridge Island and it was amazing. Had terrific meals and ate them all outside. Visited with friends we don’t get to spend a lot of time with. Great museums. We went to the Flying Heritage museum and I told the docent, “This is the coolest place I didn’t know I wanted to see.” Yet another thing my sweetheart dragged me to that I never would have discovered on my own.

17 years and still plodding along.

I believe this is from New Years 1996 when we announced our engagement. Location: Olympia, WA. Person in the background: Auntie Janet. My cousin Bari is the one who introduced us. Didn’t my sweetie have fetching eyewear?

Remember in December I bought this big giant bag of flour? Bob shook his head like I was crazy.

Today, the bag is finished.

Remember when I said that I take all my withered potatoes and bury them in the garden? Check it out. This isn’t even all of them yet.

How many times have you thought: I have a few minutes, I’m going to jump online to pay this bill, or print out this airline ticket and then next thing you know you are in some version of update hell waiting for things to download and then unpack and then load and then restart and before that can happen it wants you to update some other thing?

Yesterday I thought I’d do a streaming exercise class but I couldn’t get it to work. I tried every browser on my machine and then I figured it must be from when I updated my operating system. I spent the next 45 minutes making sure everything was up to date, uninstalling and reinstalling, dumping plug-ins, adding widgets, restarting my computer and on and on. I tried to stream via Netflix and got an error message so I did what that said. I looked in support forums. I finally went back to the class site and tried a different class: which worked fine. They’ve recently changed their interface so for whatever reason the class I wanted to take wouldn’t work. That was a stupid way to spend the morning.

The situation with my photos has become dire. I’ve always been lazy about the way I organize them but at least put them into folders with the date and event. I’ve got about a month’s worth that are just blobbed together with confusing duplicates and millions of pictures of pumpkins and dahlias. Every time I try to get a grip on it, I want to cry. So still no vacation photos or Reno photos.

Back in December, I think, I decided to upgrade the operating system on my desktop computer. I bought a 171 page book to help me with this process and I have been working on it ever since.

Every step involved something that took anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 days. It was like: you need to go to this tiny village outside Lisbon to get something but if you can’t do that you can follow this guy on Twitter and the last Thursday of every month, he’ll give you the secret password that you can enter into a special website that you can only access during 2am and 3am in your time zone, once you get it you have to hop on one foot in front of your computer for 207 seconds while wearing a red hat and press shift-control-þ.

Now you’re done with step one.

If you don’t have a þ key, you need to go to Beijing …

I’m barely exaggerating here. Plus I could only work on it when I was stone sober and had all my brain cells operating on maximum which means I never worked on it after work or after a morning of writing.

I upgraded my ram. I learned out to do a proper back-up. I bought an external HD, utilities and widgets. I upgraded and uninstalled. I opened accounts and created passwords.

I finally finished this morning. I skipped a couple of post-installation steps (for now) because I could not bear to create one more username and super secure password. But I authorized and gave permission and near as I can tell: every account and device I ever have had in the history of history is now linked to every other account and device I have ever had. I’m still not sure what that means. There’s probably a guy in a basement somewhere draining my retirement account right this minute.

I’m still trying to learn how to keep a calendar on a computer. I am very fond of writing things down.

I received an alert about the Reserves game tomorrow on my desktop at the same time that my phone was ding-a-linging in the other room. Yay?

I killed all my old Adobe apps and downloaded the cloud thing. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to do these pictures in the latest iteration of Photoshop. I am working hard to bring all three of you loyal readers, the content to which you are accustomed.

Tomorrow is going to be a computer free day. I’ve got two soccer games in the next 24 hours. I’m going to do an hour of power in the yard. Everything is coming together. Finally.

These are all my notebooks from the beginning of time. It took me awhile to round them all up. They’re stuck in cupboards and bookshelves all over my room. I already found one I missed.

The very earliest stuff is from 1978. There are several in progress now. Most are from the 90’s when I was really in to Natalie Goldberg and freewriting my face off.

They’re not all full and some are new and have never been written in. But most of them are well used.

I haven’t been rigidly consistent but usually when I start a new one I write a few lines on the inside cover about where I’m at like where I live and work and relationship status. Since those things have been consistent for so long, now I tend to write what I’m working on. If it’s a fancy notebook I write where I got it. I put the date I started and the date it’s finished on the cover.

I number the pages and use the inside cover as a sort-of table of contents so I can scan to see what’s in the notebook. For example, “Germany trip, pp 17-27” “Spaceship story, pp 33.”

A lot of it should be burned. The oldest stuff, when it was more about journaling, is truly horrifying. Whew: Drama. Queen.

A few months ago I was looking for something and I paged through a half-dozen of them from about 7 years ago. There is some cool stuff in those. The last thing I need right now are new projects but there were so many ideas and clippings, it made me want to stack them next to the bed and treasure hunt.

I wish I was better about keeping them up now. Now so much is digital, I don’t use them much for collecting random thoughts.

I don’t know why I took this with the shadows on the cover. This notebook is covered with stickers of the German national team for the 2002 World Cup.

I used to do a thing where I’d do a computer free day on the weekends. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

During one of my insomnia nights I had this great idea that I would do a computer free August. But I have to use the computer for work so then I thought I would only use the computer at work. But I actually do need to use a computer for personal things like banking and I don’t want to do that at work. Also my phone is basically a computer so I’m not sure what the plan is. Maybe I’ll just do a computer free day each weekend.