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I have been pretty busy this past week just hanging on through a dizzying ride of ups and downs. Within two and half weeks of our first open house, we had two excellent offers. Pretty amazing for this lousy market. We were giddy. Then we crashed to earth. One offer could still come through, the other may have gone forever. At one point, we had a schedule set up that would have had us here through April—meaning I would have done my SoFoBoMo project here and then dealt with moving in May, but that plan went south and now there are just more question marks. I got a surprise present from good old Shutterfly (I had tested their service a couple of years ago) offering me a free 8x8 photo book. Hooray! A great practice run in case I decided to go that route for printing. My deadline was March 26. Meantime, I pounced on the wonderful information Gordon McGregor posted regarding printing at Blurb and began burning some midnight oil. I collected a batch of images and, with my newly installed profile, I tweaked them to match the profile. Whoa talk about out of gamut colors—not a pretty sight! Of course, it was the perfect time for a glitch in a hard drive. I won’t start talking about how much I lost, because if I do I will cry and we all know that you don’t want to get a keyboard wet. Not a good thing.
Well, on the roller coaster, the thrills never end. Ultimately, I had to look at the realties of the timing on our house sale and the rigors of a 30 day escrow that could start any day. The SoFoBoMo project appears to be out of reach. (For one day, I considered going to Pope Paul (that’s Butzi, of course, whom I have named The Instigator) for special dispensation on the start date, but after reading his post today on “Jumping the Gun”, I’m glad I didn’t. Whew! He’s tough. (Only kidding, Paul) Seriously, I know I can always do this solo once we are finally settled and I know where I will be the following week. However, Paul is so right about the value of doing this along with the group. For today—don’t even ask how many times I have come up with a different scenario—I plan to begin my project April 1 and face the fact that I will likely have to suspend work if we go into escrow. I will almost certainly miss the deadline. At some point when this is all over, I will finish the project. I can limit myself to a total thirty days spent on the project and celebrate the learning experience, then look forward to next year—that is if anyone is left standing and foolish enough to sign up again. Meanwhile, I can work like mad to learn as much as possible, do what I can, and celebrate the efforts of other participants.
It has been an intense week filled with growth opportunities. (Sometimes, don’t you just hate growing?) I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about the vagaries of the real estate game. I threw together a twenty page book for the free Shutterfly offer (hey, it gives me an opportunity to see how my normal editing holds up for their printing process). I experimented with a couple of cover designs and got past some of the intimidation posed by that job. I bought two new 500 gig hard drives and vowed to never trust another drive (I know, I know. It was only a matter of time) and to stop forever using Lightroom as a primary storage system. Details would only put my keyboard at risk. (I can’t say I wasn’t warned about Lightroom’s quirky and proprietary storage either.) I familiarized myself with the frustrations of adjusting to the Blurb profile and survived the shock. On the real estate front, we continue showing the house to a few prospects, while I strip more and more of the things from the house that make it warm, cozy, and mine.
Do they have a merry-go-round at this carnival?
Wow! Sounds like you've had an intense time, Anita. :-) I hope that you'll find a date that works for you for the SoFoBoMo. I'm sure that "Pope Paul" wouldn't be offended if you started a couple of days early, or finished a couple of days late. :-)
ReplyDeleteRegarding Lightroom, I'm getting more and more in Paul's camp. I don't like the way Lightroom 'decides' to store my photos. Now, after exporting a catalog, I have photos here, there, and everywhere. I prefer to keep them in a single location, perhaps two.
I don't know what I'll do with LR. I mainly use it to find things and to make small corrections. It's also great for generating web pages, but other than that, I don't use it much.
You may have noticed that one of the labels on that post is "complaint department"--my way of poking fun at my self for whining about life. It's one of those times when things fall the "wrong" way. Onward and upward.
ReplyDeleteI remember so well that Paul raised issues about Lightroom's storage system early on and I had not yet been bitten, so I followed the herd. This episode has cured me. The irony is that I had taken the precaution of storing all my recent raw files outside Lightroom on a separate hard drive. Of course, that's the drive that burped. So,now I have neither the Lightroom files, nor the raw files that were stored the old-fashioned way that had always worked for me. The bad on me is I had only those two versions of the raw files, not a third one. All that survived from all those shoots are the files that had been shipped to Photoshop and saved as independent PSD files. Live and learn.