I wrote a piece for this blog. I started before 9am as I wanted to get some thoughts down so as not to be posting it at midnight! My topic selected itself as I’ve been irked since reading a newspaper article back in October 2014. It’s time had come. It was time to explore why this little article irritated so. The article had a life of its own since I cut it out of the paper. It lived on my dining table for many days. I knew I had to file it in order to ensure it didn’t get trashed. But which folder, pile or bookshelf was it lurking in? Phew, thanks Progoff. Perhaps I was too hasty eschewing the structure and organisation of this form of journaling.
Anyway, knowing I had my blog on a roll from early morning I allowed myself to relax, just let my day leisurely unfold:
- a walk. The experience of walking is both physical and an abstraction. There are heavy leg days. There are light, springy leg days. It’s about finding a rhythm for the legs. A rhythm also for the mind as I learn to empty it of whirling stuff and notice my environment. I read somewhere how a taoist said that feet take up a tiny space, and it’s so apt. These little size 4’s have transported me many, many miles.
- spotting just 31 horses in local fields. There’s something so relaxing about seeing them just grazing away. a couple noticed and looked in expectation. One looked from afar and started strolling toward me, but realising I was not stopping it stopped. One, in the distance appeared to be standing in a pond. I checked on my return and it was still standing there, its legs totally submerged. I’m wondering if `I should go back tomorrow to check if it’s OK
- noticing the drizzle. Drizzle takes many different forms. This was fine, almost invisible like a Scottish mountain mist, making everything soggy
- solving the daily issue of ‘what’s for tea?’
- exchanging time and words with a supermarket cashier with just 30 minutes of her shift left. She was coping with this temporality by taping over the time on her checkout computer screen. Time flies when you’re not watching the clock
- setting up a ‘Dropbox’ account in order to share tiff photograph files with my photography tutor ready for an upcoming exhibition. If you’re around West Yorkshire you might take a look. It appears as though I set up a Dropbox account in 2014. I’ve never used it to share before and it proved relatively easy to add tiffs and share. I’m amazed by the difference in file sizes. My stored JPEGs were 155kb whereas the tiffs were 93Mb’s! Too large to e-mail as the limit is about 24Mb. Apparently the difference is down to a compression process where the software selects details and colours to compress and leave out when creating JPEG’s. This happens in your DSLR camera also if it’s set to take pics as JPEG’s! It strikes me that by the time they’ve been compressed by software they may not really be what you saw through the viewfinder
- learning how to export dng files as tiff files in Photoshop Lightroom 5. Not always an easy program to use. It just doesn’t seem as intuitive as some of its predecessors. I’m told it’s great for cataloguing though. I must try that as I now have some 1200 photos
- tea – pasta parmigiana
- unearthing my little school size exercise books in which I’d scrawled my feelings and thoughts about the newspaper article at the time
- urging my cat to exit the house as she was about to heave up a hairball. This must be a horrible feeling, but she was quickly removed.
- composing my blog directly in WordPress
- stopping to watch the 9pm re-scheduled BBC 2 Only Connect quiz. A must.
A topsy, turvy day indeed.
This isn’t the intented, timetabled blog. This isn’t the blog I’ve drafted, amended, linked to and toiled over. This isn’t the blog where I identified and named my irritations, my irksome frustrations and partly understood what the article was about. This is a replacement blog. After the quizzical interlude I discovered my jottings since 7.39pm had not been saved. These early jottings were my workings out. In some frustration I deleted it. It will resurface and, at least I know where the newspaper cutting is and I’ve begun to unearth some of the edges which cause irritation. It’s time will come.
Meanwhile, as Ray Bradbury said ” You only fail if you stop writing.’
annie's blogette 