Overwhelmed

Yes, it’s true, I like to be busy. I like to do things. I like to make things. I have lots in my head that I can’t wait to see in the real world. Sometimes, it’s all a bit too much.

I’m officially in a loop. I’m stuck, and feeling very overwhelmed. In fact, I’ve just placed Jose Gonzalez “Heartbeats” ON a loop on iTunes, hoping the peacefulness will help.I’m sure some of this is hormones. Some of this is accumulated crap from a busy year at work. Some of this is the stress and exhaustion oozing from my husband: we’ve had some layoffs at the University that have again created more work for him. HE needs a vacation, and instead he has MORE work to do this summer.

Add to this the fact I’ve just purchased Adobe CS4 design premium to get me up to speed for setting up my awesome (in my mind) website. Until this time, all my photo prep has been done in a REALLY OLD version of Photoshop elements, my layout work in either MSWord or MSPublisher, my vector drawing in EQ6, and my last web-coding was done 7 years ago in MS Frontpage. My friends, the world has changed.

I know that a lot of readers of this will be scratching their heads and saying “man, she is BEHIND the times” or “okay, she’s making do with what she has”. OTHER readers will be saying “??? who knew there were all those different programs???” 😉

I am a computer geek, who’s had less and less time to spend understanding what she uses, but now there’s a wall in front of me that I have to break through. I need to understand how this new set of programs works – and that’s confounding me, because I have all this art I want to make, I have some house reorganizing to do, oh and a family to pay attention to…

So, I’m spinning my wheels. I don’t have a plan on how to fix this, except maybe try to have a conversation with my hubby about how I prioritize this next month – he’s very helpful, when I can correctly verbalize where my stuckness is…perhaps I’ll just ask him to read this post!

Here’s a stab at me playing with photoshop:

I live in S. CA, and this beautiful rose garden came with our house. We’ve had an amazingly cool May/June so far, and they are doing fantastically

I have an awesome DSLR, a Nikon D40, which I am still just beginning to learn to use. Today I decided to use the Macro setting:

Here’s what happens JUST when I use “Autotone” in Photoshop:

HOLY CRAP! Is this a stupendous picture, or am I hallucinating?

Any old who, here are a bunch more pix, that I was randomly trying out all sorts of little tweaks on. But after I discovered the autotone feature, I couldn’t, in my blind stumbling, do any better than that.    Miles to go…