Long Weekend

A three day weekend is like hitting a lottery that gives you extra free time. I like to use long weekends for adventuring but this wasn’t the case for this weekend celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I’m mostly staying home this No Spend Month. Plus, thanks to Covid, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do once you get there.

Consequently, I spent Friday night and yesterday fussing that I was wasting time. After all, when you work all week, free days feel like a luxury that shouldn’t be squandered.

Yesterday, I walked at a local park and made an effort to look for different things to photograph. Like this.

And this.

So far this weekend I have made some really good vegan mac and cheese and watched the movie Jo Jo Rabbit, the wonderful documentary Streetlight Harmonies and a few episodes of I Love Lucy. I played with the cat, read some, wrote a letter on nice stationary, got a little rest and did some organizing.

Friends, my fridge is both clean and organized.

It was a nice balance of fun and work, active and lazy. When I think about it that way- it all seems like a good use of my time. Enjoy this day, friends.

Bad Habits

Of my many bad habits, one is making pictures without recording subject matter. This photo is from a trip to Kentucky a few years ago and popped up in my Snapfish account while looking for something else. It took some thinking and a quick Google search to figure out that it’s St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Lexington, Kentucky. The perspective is  through the glass of a very nice hotel room window.

It strengthens my desire to not just record my surroundings but to document where I am and to tell as many stories as possible. Meanwhile, I’m still wading through the 7,000 pictures (that’s not a typo – 7,000 pictures) pulled from my iPhone last month. If I ever get caught up with sorting through that mess, I’ll start weeding through the digital and print pictures from the past.

What are your bad photography habits? I can’t be the only one that has them!

The Small Things

One of my No Spend Month projects is to do some organizing. This weekend, I gathered up my most commonly used dry smoothie supplies into a basket. Flax and chia seeds, unsweetened coconut, protein powder and even the measuring cup live together in this basket so that I can easily move all these ingredients from the pantry to the blender.

Since I make a smoothie for breakfast most mornings, this promises to save me some effort every day. It will also go a long way toward keeping my pre-work routine organized and peaceful. Sometimes it’s the little things that really do matter.

Project Time

When the weather turns cold and the snow starts to fly, I have to settle down and start organizing digital pictures.

There are duplicates and bad pictures that need to be deleted.  That’s time consuming but easy. However, some are organized by date and others by topic and this is where I run into trouble. In the long run, organizing by date doesn’t work because you have to know what year or month to look under to find anything. This works for birthdays and events you associate with a specific date but not much else.

So I think they need to be organized by topic and then by date but this part of the process sounds overwhelming. Plus, I have pictures burned to disc and saved on Snapfish but not anywhere else. Not to mention the stacks of prints waiting for albums.

If I get started this November, I should be all caught up in five or six years!

Who has tips for organizing digital photos? I would love to learn from your experience!