I Contain Multitudes?

I bought a Wacom tablet that came with Photoshop Elements 7 software which I installed and have been playing with for a couple of weeks now. I had been using Photoshop 7 before but it had been acting weird on my new laptop so I am glad to have PE 7 and may eventually purchase PE 9. I've heard about some of the improvements and I think I would enjoy using it.

They are redoing the quad area of campus. They have been working on it for a couple of semesters. I think they are about to get it finished. I saw these three buckets in the sand pile and they intrigued me. I had been reading a couple of books written by a Jungian analyst who talks a lot about our unconscious and how much affect (effect) on us. One of the points he made was that when we talk about and refer to ourselves as "I" we really have no idea how much larger we are than just the conscious parts of ourselves that we are aware of. Very interesting. Or at least I thought so. 

Words

I remember when I used to just open this little blank Blogger screen and type away. Thoughts came easily then. Now it seems I have to think harder about what I want to write and even in thinking harder, I can't really come up with anything too significant to say!

Registration started yesterday for grad students and seniors, with the juniors joining in today at one. I stayed steadily busy all day long with helping students who needed permits to get into certain classes. I love most of the professors I work with but there are two women (one not in our department) who always confuse and complicate things. I must have gotten twenty emails today from the two of them about their getting things done for their advisees. One student came in with a form that needed to be signed by our department head and also the head of the nursing department. When I told him the department head was not in, he informed me that the secretary in the nursing department had signed for their department head. I informed him that I was not the secretary for the nursing department and we did not do that kind of stuff in our department!

So, tonight I am tired and lazy, but I got a post done and I said at the beginning that I was not going to worry so much about quality as I was going to concern myself with quantity!

I think I am going to head to bed and listen to the election returns.

(Amended to add: I did not go to bed! I played around in Photoshop with some leaf photos I took this evening after we had a much needed rain. Here are the results.)

Experiment

I tried this once before, doing a post from my phone with a picture but the picture turned out to be way too big when it appeared on the blog. Let's see what happens today...


Okay, good news! It worked! (Isn't this an exciting "first day" post?? Stayed tuned for more riveting writing and more poetic photography! LOL)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

NaBloPoMo

Okay, to whoever still comes by here to see what is happening: November is NaBloPoMo and I am going to take this opportunity to attempt to get back into the habit of blogging regularly. See? I have my badge and everything! Facebook is all right, but it does not seem to do as much for me as blogging does (or used to do for me--will the fun return?).

We will see how things go. I may post this today and that may be all I post. I am a bit concerned about what I will find to write about. The NaBloPoMo site will be putting up daily prompts so I may use some of those. I am considering taking a workshop on photography as a contemplative practice so that may also give me inspiration. I think this will be a month of eclectic musings. I do have a blogging app on my phone, so I could conceivably post a quick quote or simple observation every day. Or I could post a phone photo. So I do have options! Stay tuned!

If you do come around to comment, I will try my best to acknowledge your presence. And I will try to reciprocate with comments to your blogs. Please remember that most of my Facebook friends have no clue about the existence of my alter ego Annie Oddflower nor of this blog. I'd really like to keep it that way, so I'd be grateful if you'd help me out with that!

Okay--here is to small starts, persistent paths and perhaps clumsy finishes!

Loss

I've lost an old and dear friend, an earnest soul from way back in my past with whom I recently reconnected. We were gonna catch up with each other. He called a couple of weeks ago at an inconvenient time for me and I did not answer the phone. I thought he'd leave a message and I'd get back to him. He didn't, I didn't, and now he's gone. Oh the regrets -the loss- of not taking the time to be inconvenienced a bit for an old friend.

He had a massive heart attack sometime last week and remained in a coma until he died yesterday morning. He was my old youth pastor, one of my earliest mentors. Part of the inconvenience of his phone call was my own discomfort at knowing how different I am now from the "kid" he remembered from back then. And yet, he saw things in me and encouraged me and challenged me in his own way and now, in hindsight, I feel that the reconnection would have been worth the discomfort. How many good things do I miss because I am unwilling to suffer through and move past my own discomfort?

I've been reading back through my archives, reading all the posts made during September. Seems there are a lot of storms in September, literal and metaphorical. I've been thinking about this blog and how things were when I started blogging, about how I felt back then and about how much water has passed under the bridge since then.

I've never really gotten a clear focus on what I wanted to do with the blog. When I started out, I had been writing poetry and interacting on some of the poetry boards. That sort of fizzled out and I started writing here. Then when I went back to school, I started posting photographs and a little bit of my artsy-fartsy endeavors. But that is me, a bit eclectic and a whole lot unfocused!

I am back in a bit of a funk, taking medication that does not seem to be working all that well. Everything feels flat. It seems the changing of the seasons always helps perk me up. I am hoping the cooler weather will somehow invigorate my spirit and I can enjoy life again.

I had a dear friend send me the following quote with instructions to hang it in my closet (I assume so I would see it often). Naturally, I made a "thang" out of it. . .

New Roads