Category: Blogging

and I can’t get caught up.

I am having a hard time balancing my compulsions lately. About the only thing I’ve managed to do regularly is to get to the Y and exercise for an hour or two each day so at least I don’t sacrifice my health to my other obsessions. You need to be healthy if you’re going to try to clean up past mistakes.

My main obsession, as I mention recently, is trying to clear out old photos that are filling up nearly two very large hard drives. I don’t even want to think about how many CD’s full of even older shots I might have waiting on the shelf. And we won’t even mention all the old slides that really should be converted to digital copies so that they don’t get thrown out when no one has slide projectors around to show them.

Conservatively, I’ve been locating and deleting nearly a thousand photos a day. Before I can delete many of them, I need to find them on backup hard drives because they have become disconnected from Aperture over time. Many of them became disconnected when I had to buy a larger hard drive to back them up. If I just delete them from Aperture without first locating them, they never actually get deleted from the hard drive, and that certainly defeats the purpose of what I’m doing.

So far I’m just tackling the easy part, deleting photos that aren’t as good as photos taken the same day or photos of subjects that I know in my head that I have better shots, common birds like Great Blue Herons, American Bitterns, Kingfishers, favorites that I can easily remember.

It will take me probably another 40+ hours just to finish this phase of the job. The harder job will be identifying all the photos so that I can then eliminate all but the very best of the shots, and the ones that have personal value because they remind me vividly of particular experiences.

It’s hard to remember that this is merely an extension of another job I started recently, trying to clean out my office so that I can paint, lay a new floor, and move the furniture around so that I can spend more time doing artwork.

Luckily it’s winter and I don’t have any plans to go anywhere until spring. We’ve descended into the winter rains here, and it’s supposed to get even worse in the near future. So, maybe I will be able to get back to reading and writing sooner rather than later.

Of course, I suspect I originally started this cleanup to avoid writing about Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. I have given both a lot of thought, though, and I’m not willing to throw them out until I have finally written something about them.

My lack of recent posting was due to an extended trip to Santa Rosa, California I just returned from. Normally when I’m about to leave on a birding trip and am not going to have internet access I’ll try to post several blog entries that will appear on upcoming dates while I’m gone. I didn’t feel that would be necessary this trip, however, because Mary has a high-speed Internet connection and I thought I would have lots of time to post entries.

I knew she had been having problems with her provider, but we completely lost the connection over the long weekend, making it impossible to post an entry from her house. It turned out squirrels had been chewing on the lines making the connection unstable. Strangely, exactly the same thing happened to our service in Tacoma a couple of years ago. I wonder how common the problem is?

Actually, though, I found the intermittent dropping of the connection more frustrating than simply not having it available at all. It seemed like every time I was about to post a blog entry the connection would cut out. Under such conditions, I found it difficult to get motivated enough to spend the time writing copy or even cropping pictures.

Not only was I unable to post entries, I was unable to read several of the ebooks books I had taken with me. I was surprised to discover that much of the commentary in my iPad book on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience required an Internet connection because they were served from YouTube. The same was true of a biology textbook I’m reading.

I have long been aware of how much time I spend on computers but much less aware how much of that time is spent connected to the internet. Looking back at my journal, which automatically tracks my time online, it turns out that most of my time spent on the computer lately is connected to the internet. The internet has become so woven into my daily life that it’s nearly impossible to live â€?”normally” without it. Not sure I like that, but life certainly seems less pleasant without it.

Anyway, I should return to my normal schedule of posting four or five times a week once I’ve caught up here,. I’ll start with pictures from the trip and then attempt to make some comments on Joyce’s The Dubliners, which I finished while cut off from the internet, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.

Unplugged

I’m about to head out on a 3-5 camping trip and decided that since many of those days will be spent carrying a pack uphill that I would leave all my computer equipment at home since I didn’t want to leave a Mac Book Air and other computer equipment at the trailhead. I know from experience that too often it isn’t safe.

It’s bad enough having your car broken into without losing expensive equipment that the insurance company won’t cover without an extended policy. Normally when I go birding I keep reasonably close to my car and don’t worry too much about it being broken into, but that would defeat the purpose of this particular trip.

Besides, after ten+ years of blogging and constant time on the internet I want to see what it feels like to simply shut it all down for three to four days. I suspect it might be harder to quit than smoking, but I think I need to find out.

I can’t get caught up. I used to consider In A Dark Time my personal journal and took pride in keeping my reader informed of my daily activities. I would comment on a poem on the day I had read it and post pictures the day I had taken them. Often times I would comment on a current article in a magazine and offer a direct link. Occasionally, I would comment on another blogger’s entry the same day he/she had made that entry.

For better or worse, that’s no longer true. I simply can’t keep up the pace I set earlier. Most of the time now, my pictures appear here 3 to 7 days after I’ve taken them. When I discuss a snowstorm, it’s probably one that has long since disappeared.

I don’t really know when I originally fell behind but I do know some of the reasons why it happened. First, after reading some reports on the Internet, I decided it might not be the wisest thing to tell people when I was out of town, particularly since I’ve never tried to maintain any kind of anonymity. Loren Webster is really my name; I really do live in Tacoma; I really do all those things I tell you about. My phone number and address are readily available to anyone who wants to find it.

Recently I’ve taken longer birding trips and though I take my laptop with me on those trips it’s often inconvenient to edit and post photos and copy when I’d rather be out birding. In addition, those trips often produce more shots than I’m willing to put on one post. In fact, a whole day of shooting may provide 4 to 5 days of pictures.

Although poetry remains my first love, lately I seem to have focused more on novels and nonfiction works. While I was relatively easy to pick out a poem I particularly liked or one that seemed particularly significant and comment on it while reading the work, it’s much harder to discern significant ideas and comment on them while reading a longer book. Consequently, I often don’t start commenting on a book until a week or so after I finished reading it.

Strangely enough, even though I think I’ve improved as a photographer, it takes longer for me to decide which photos to use and how much work I wanted to do to refine them. I look back at some of the early photos I posted and know that I would simply erase them today. Better camera equipment and new insights make it harder to decide which photographs to use. Occasionally, the artist in me wants to transform snapshots into photographs that will grab the reader’s attention.

Blogging for ten years makes it harder to get enthused about posting every day — that, and a natural tendency to procrastinate.