Long time no see; what I’ve been up to for the last month.

Hi everyone, it’s been a long time hasn’t it!

Upgrade

As you can see I’ve updated my website.  It’s now running wordpress on the backend, rather than drupal.  This is because drupal is rather a pain in the ass to upgrade, and wordpress is drop dead simple.  As I would rather spend more time doing fun things than upgrading drupal, I decided it was time to move.  However there are no tools to transfer all my drupal posts to wordpress, so I’ve been manually copying and pasting things over from my old drupal instance to the new wordpress one.  Finally I’ve finished!

Overextended

I’ve been feeling overextended lately.  I’m trying to do too much stuff with too little time.  And as a consequence I’ve been getting nothing done very well at all.  So I’ve decided I have to focus on things one at a time.  Or at least not 5 or 6 at a time.

1. Taking care of my daughter.  This is my top priority.  Making sure she’s well cared for, growing well, developing well, etc etc.
2. For now, my number 2 priority is cleaning the clutter out of my house.  I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I haven’t dedicated myself to this much.  I’ve been listing things on craigslist off and on for months, and I’ve done really well at clearing out the major amounts of clutter.  But there is still MUCH to do.  This shouldn’t take too much time per night anymore, as I’m nearing the end, but I do need to make a dedicated push to finish up.  With a newborn daughter, I’m acquiring many things just for her, and so something has to give!
3. Save money for a european vacation in the fall.  Back to italy again probably.  I’d like to do a 3 week trip this time, so I have to be stingy on my vacation as well.  This one doesn’t require too much effort on my part, other than eating at home, and not spending wildly.
4. Continue with learning italian.  I am meeting with a tutor for 2 hours once every 2 weeks.  But I really need to work on this at least an hour a day.  I need to do flashcards, and play with rosetta stone, and livemocha.com and such, so that I can keep progressing with my knowledge.  I would someday love to be fluent.  That will take as they all say about 10000 hours of practice.  I have a long way to go
5. Get better at photography.  I really feel that I have made huge strides in this lately, and I attribute that to the project365 that I had been working on.  This is the biggest thing that has to give right now.  I’m stopping my project365 for now.  The process of seeking out and finding pictures every day and postprocessing, and uploading, writing blogs posts and all that just takes up too much time.  What I want to do now is take pictures all the time still, but condense the project into a picture a week.  I have more free time on the weekends, so i will probably be posting on weekends.  I may change it so that I write the posts on the weekend but they are published on monday when more people are around.

So, the bottom line is, for the activities I have a choice in, I’m going to focus on cleaning out my clutter first, then italian, and following closely behind, is photography.  I still want to progress, and I would still love to make a living with photography, so this order may change again in the future.  I still carry my camera with me almost everywhere, so I’m ready when inspiration strikes.

Todays photo was taken down on main street in my town, on my way home from work one day. I love the light coming through the flowerpetals.

35mm, 1/800 second, f/2.8, ISO 200