Feeding My Head

Today I realized how much I procrastinate on feeding my electronics properly.

I have a very nice android phone that takes pretty decent pictures. Several clicks and five minutes later, I have the shots imported to Aperture and deleted from the phone. From Aperture, I will sprinkle editorial goodness on them, and export them back to my desktop, mid-route to this blog. The photos will illustrate an adventure I had last week.

Last week, I also went to the library and picked up Allison Krauss's A Hundred Miles or More, which I have ripped to iTunes and uploaded to my iPod for appropriate appreciation. If I enjoy the album, I will purchase my very own copy, which I will then park in my collection to justify its continued presence on my iPod. I'm looking forward to listening, very much. My daughter just got back from the Bonnaroo Music Festival, and had good things to say about Allison Krauss's live performance (as well as the live performances of 12 or so other bands). I'm listening to the album as I write this post.

After a desperate but fruitful search for the appropriate cable, I've transferred 300+ photographs from my Nikon D40 into Aperture. I spent a little time de-skewing a few, but mostly just filed them into projects and left them there. I have the shots I want in order to illustrate my next food post, and I'm happy to let the rest sit there and wait for next time. I've done all of this with the assistance of my beautiful MacBook Pro, which I love. Truly, madly, deeply. I appreciate my phone, my iPod, my digital SLR, my laptop, and my Sony Reader. Most of you have Kindles, but I chose the Sony, and I'm pleased with it. I've read quite a few books downloaded from Project Gutenberg, and also have some ebooks from friends that I'm meaning to read soon.

I just backed up all of my data on an external hard drive (500G) and feel safe now, with all my photographs safe and sound in case of hard drive meltdown. It only remains for me to figure out how to back up my blog posts in some less labor intensive way than saving each post in a text file (ridiculous, I know, but I am still a novice). I'm aware, more than ever, of how much of my work depends on this tangle of cables, this small pile of devices that will all fit into one backpack. My entire music library, part of a book library, all of my photographs and stories, packed up in under than twenty pounds. A miracle, and something I'm consciously grateful for. It makes for nervous travel when I have all the devices in the one pack, but I feel powerful too, like I could create anything.

I procrastinate by leaving CDs lying around, unripped, un-transferred, and therefore unheard. My iPod docks in my clock radio, which I keep next to my bed. If I don't sometimes undock it and synch it with the laptop, I get no new music, and there is a near constant flow of new music coming into my house via my daughter. I procrastinate by leaving photos on my camera, and photos on my phone. Usually, I take food photos with my phone, because I'm not going to do anything with those photos but post them here to illustrate this meal, or that meal. The photos I take with my camera are those I may enlarge and frame, to hang in the gallery at home. Until recently, I had never enlarged one of my photos and had it professionally framed. The shot at the beginning of this post is my first professionally framed photo. I took it on Seventeen Mile Drive in Monterey in February of this year. This flower is called Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans).

Once in a while, all this stuff beckons to me and I have an evening like this one, where I take the time to hunt down all of the cables, listen to music, and get everything uploaded/downloaded/filed/organized, and it feels good. Once in a while I stop the procrastinating, and I take the time to feed my head with images and words. Not only have I gathered things together, but I've also browsed through old folders full of photos, and spent about thirty minutes exercising my Google fu to find the name of the purple flower pictured above. I want to know these things. I bring home treasures, and I want to organize them, and pin them to mounting boards, but I also want to know what they are. I want to know about this stuff, the species, the details, the names. Isn't that a lovely name for a flower? Pride of Madeira. I would never have known, if I hadn't stopped on the side of the road on the coast of California and carefully composed a shot of some random shrub. There is was, and now it's in my head, and framed on my wall, forever.

It's a kind of magic, really.

www.joymarchand.com