Keep It Real
Wednesday. To bed earlier last night than I usually retire, awaking a couple of times before morning: one to loud talking around one by a young couple down on the sidewalk, a second time when Ms. Emmy felt a need to bump me with her head letting me know she felt it was time for her breakfast (at four in the morning, dear god), up and awake finally after eight. Back home from breakfast now at eleven, having read the papers in great detail, the mind relatively sharp I was thinking as I was reading (give myself a self serving pat on the back!), the walk to and from the café stepping out and feeling good for an old guy who tends to whine at the drop of a hat.
Now, what to do this day, the head seemingly intact, the sun shining with a nice breeze coming off the sea? Deedle-dee-dee? How about staying inside and working on the web sites?
Sun shining, birds singing and you're saying you'll stay inside and work on your web sites?
Why not? I've recently been spending time on the journal pages, the menus particularly, and noticing how, um, badly they were coded, how a simple fix or two will straighten them out. My journal menu, the month menus, for example: all of them out of whack. A simple twitch or two to the code and they're fixed. I'm not finished with them, but I've been making progress. I'm not much of a web developer, although I guess I do enjoy some of the coding and I did spend time when I was younger working with graphic designers on magazines. How to present this stuff cleanly without a lot of clutter and fuss?
Then yesterday, still thinking about this, I got an email from Adobe asking me to complete a survey on their current CS3 products. I have PhotoShop, of course, Illustrator (for no particular good reason, although I took a beginner's course in San Francisco some years back), Dreamweaver (because they haven't updated Homesite and now Homesite won't run on my Vista laptop), Lightroom (because I have PhotoShop and someone said in an ad I needed to have it) and Acrobat (to make pdf's), but I haven't done anything with audio or video or the other special effects you can create with Flash, Fireworks and something called Contribute. So I took the survey.
And the thought then occurred, well, why should I not learn these tools? Yes, finish cleaning up the journal, but why not learn to add, say, audio clips when I have one that's appropriate? I have this small digital audio recorder I carry with me when I'm out. I generally forget I have it when an opportunity arises, but sometimes I remember and sometimes I make recordings. Maybe a snippet or two embedded in a page would be nice. I have time now, right? Feeling good doesn't mean I have to spend every minute out on the street, right? Retirement is about finding what you really want to do and not what people think you should do, right? Right?
Does this mean you'll be doing the laundry more often, now that your motor is running and you're feeling so good?
Now, now, keep it real.
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