What a Life!

“I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it.” — Rose Kennedy

Someday when I grow up, I’m gonna be just like Ben.

I used to blog regularly, way back in the day, but somehow I lost my mojo. I would say there are three simple reasons for this:

First of all, we started homeschooling. As a new homeschooler, I was figuring things out and didn’t really want to write posts about what we were doing only to be made to look foolish by the comments people left. I didn’t want my enthusiasm to be mistaken for a superiority complex. So I wrote this off as a topic for blogging, even though it absorbed much of my life and creative energy.

Second, I work from home and have clients who may read my blog. When I blog, I feel guilty, like they’re going to be mad at me. “She’s blogging, but she hasn’t gotten my pattern back to me yet. What is she doing?!?!?”

Finally, there really wasn’t much left to write about. I mean, I know my kids still do cute things, but I’m so busy I hardly have time for a quick status update on Facebook, much less writing a clever blog post about it.

This weekend I took time off for masterly inactivity. I didn’t do any editing. In fact, I hardly did any knitting. But I feel very much refreshed. I have a rule against working on Sunday evenings, but after a weekend of doing nothing, I decided to bend the rule a little.

And you know what? I was at the top of my game. Two hours spent editing, 100% focused and engaged in what I was doing. If only I could always be that way when I work.

I think I am going to indulge in masterly inactivity more often. And I won’t feel guilty about it. I’ll play the piano. Do sudoku puzzles. Read good books. Spend time with my family. Go for long walks. Make cookies. And maybe even knit. I’ll even blog about it, and I won’t feel guilty about it at all. I’ll get to those patterns, and my designers will get the most for every dollar they spend having me edit their patterns.

And homeschooling? I love homeschooling. It’s a journey, not a destination. But I’m ready to start talking about it and leave tracks for others to follow. I have learned so much from others who have blogged about their homeschooling journeys. It is time to start writing about our own.

The weather was warm today. Sixty degrees. I didn’t know warm could feel so good! After a high of 3 degrees one day last week, we have earned it.

I went for a walk – wearing cropped workout pants and a short sleeve shirt – and water was running everywhere from all the snow that was melting. What a delight!

I also am having a mild knitting crisis.

The sweater…

…the scarf…

…and the blanket I am working on suddenly need to be finished NOW so I can move on to spring knitting. Well, perhaps the scarf could be considered spring knitting as it is lace and very light.

The socks I’m working on almost bit the dust. I feared the leg of the sock was too tight to get my heel through, but I tried them on today and they fit delightfully well.

The sweater probably won’t be finished in time to wear this winter, but I shall enjoy it next fall. And the weather may be chilly again by next weekend.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the warmth.

So enjoying The Joy Diet (as previously discussed)…and as a part of that I’ve rediscovered my love of blogging – both writing and reading blogs. But here’s the real deal: I’m learning Photoshop Elements.

Scary confession here: I’ve tried learning Photoshop before but have been completely and utterly intimidated by that beast. Last year I bought Photoshop Elements but could never get it to run on my computer right. Errrr.

Part of my Joy Diet is taking more pictures. But not knowing how to edit them and make them great had kind of taken the joy out of it. My approach had previously been to take them as best I could with my camera, which is still my approach because it’s better to do it right with the camera than to have to make corrections in post-production. Still, there are limits on that, especially when taking candid pictures.

I got the new version of Photoshop Elements (it works very nicely on my computer, thank you very much). I’m now reading this to learn how to use it. I like this book because it tells you the basics of each command and what it affects and what it doesn’t affect so you can intelligently decide which feature to use.  I’m about half way through, and it’s pretty logical in how it’s laid out. The next chapter up is the one on getting the selection tools to work – wish me luck on that (I’ve never been able to get this program to behave when it comes to making selections).

Last weekend I moved all my photos into the Organizer, then promptly decided that wasn’t going to work. I have over 11,000 photos on my computer. iPhoto organizes the photos automatically by date and then shows one photo from each date so you can scroll through and find things fairly quickly. The Organizer that comes with Elements shows each picture one by one so you have to scroll and scroll and scroll. The current plan is to leave all of my original photos (minus the ones I delete right away) in iPhoto and keep only the edited photos in Organizer. One of the benefits of that will be at the end of the year when I go to make calendars and what not, I can skim through the edited photos which should be the cream of the crop rather than going through everything.

For now, I’ve learned how to crop photos in the Organizer and color correct skin which makes my photos look much better. I know, that’s not much. But actually I’m quite excited about mastering both tasks as I’ve tried multiple times to do such simple things in Elements only to fail and fail again.

The problem, though, with learning all of the things that Photoshop Elements can do is that I now see so many more flaws in my pictures. Woe is me!

But I am taking a lot more pictures now. And that’s what makes my heart happy. Capturing those precious moments. They fly by so quickly.