What did you over the holiday weekend?
Nothing.
I didn’t read any poetry, I didn’t take any bird pictures, and I didn’t do any long walks.
I didn’t do anything I usually do.
What I did do was spend time deleting hundreds of emails as the result of some low-life spammer using my email address as the return address on his spam, helped cleaned the house, spent a delightful Thanksgiving with Dawn and her family, started making Christmas cookies with the same, wrote out a hundred dollar check to the local food bank, started looking for a family to “adopt” for Christmas, did the weekly shopping, watched the Huskies win a very lopsided basketball game, went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, watched the Seahawks win a squeaker, went on several short walks, and, most time-consuming of all, studied 183 pages in How to Wow: Photoshop for Photography
When I realize how “busy” I was on thse four days “off,” I’m amazed I find any time to read poetry and embarrassed by how few poetry books I’ve managed to read since summer, not to mention how few poems I’ve written.
Luckily, I like How to Wow, a lot and continue to read and complete the accompanying exercises, since merely reading about Photoshop is ineffective for me. I learned how to create timesaving droplets to process photos for my web page so that I had more time to devote to How to Wow.
My favorite, though, was learning how to isolate and adjust particular colors by using Hue/Saturation and choosing particular colors from the drop-down menu. In the future, in one easy step I’ll be able to eliminate weird green colors in the water
, even if they are in the original negative.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, it appears that some of the best ideas appear in the final chapters, and it will take awhile to get through the final 100 pages. That probably means I’ll be doing a little less poetry for awhile, though I plan on finishing Billy Collins’ books by tomorrow at the latest.