Looking Back

For some reason I've gotten stuck and have had a hard time doing some of the simple tasks associated with wrapping up my recent travel.

I gave myself some time off, unpacked, caught up with house and yard work, rested... and even got a good start on a photo album (rounding out my meager documentation of the trip with images acquired from others).

I still need to do an expense report, but as our company tends to handle those quite slowly I now avoid making work-related expenditures I can't afford to let slide for a while. Since the plane tickets were already covered, I just have a few hotels ($25/night!) and small things to reimburse. I'll get to that when I get to it.

Checking in and doing a good "report" (or even a "good report"!) to my staff here and our colleagues in Florida is still a bit overwhelming. And somehow writing a newsletter, even a short follow-up/update for my church prayer chain, has had me stymied. I thought it might help if I got the photo album done first.

I'd left the collection of the most prolific photographer on the two teams, for last. LM took many hundreds of images. Well, now I've gone through them all. I'm happy to say I have uploaded my picks for printing at our local drugstore. This kind of thing is so much faster and easier than it used to be, and no more expensive! Tomorrow morning I can pick them up, and maybe before the weekend is over I'll have them added to my half-done album.

Maybe next time I'll try just putting together a good slide show - not going for print at all. We'll see. The advantage of the 12X12 albums I do is that they allow people to look at 7-8 pictures at once. People who want to see the pictures can do so without getting bogged down trying to figure things out or ask questions. I think the experience is more pleasant for the viewer. But a self-running slide show would have some of the same advantages.

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Ever since the day I spent alone, dreaming and writing on "Paradise Island" (item #5 from the itinerary described in this post), I have pondered putting together a print booklet with stories, journal entries, interview excerpts, quotes, and pictures to pass along to the members of my fan club. I have some really good stuff, some of which I can't pass on in a venue like this one. But if I put it all together in a Publisher file, I could make as many copies as I want - or make it available as an email attachment if I'm strict about the security of the contents. It's a rather ambitious project though.