I have not been feeling the flickr love lately.

I know every loves flickr and flickr this and flickr that, but I’m starting to kind of adamantly dislike it.

First, I guess we went pro for gallery and archival purposes all in one.

So, archiving: Well, the new photos we take are in CR2 format (camera raw, which holds a lot more information than jpgs). So in order to upload them to flickr, I have to convert them, or I just pull out the embedded jpg. So already, it doesn’t really work for archiving, because it’s not the full raw file. We’d want THAT file, not the lesser quality jpg.

Second, maybe if I had a couple hundred photos, and tagged each one carefully and knowingly as I uploaded them I wouldn’t feel this frustration, but I took all the photos from our old (now non-functional) gallery and uploaded them in many various sessions, with minimal or no tagging as I went. The photostream is in the order of uploading, not ordered by when the photo was actually taken. So the trip to Oregon we took when Ethan was 4 months old is kind of in the wrong “place” in the photostream because I uploaded it a few months ago. Again, not a big deal if we didn’t have a ton of photos, but we have over 4,000. When I went looking for Ethan pictures to use on his birthday post, it took way too long to find ones that I wanted to use.

I do like the sets, and how a photo can be a member of more than one set at a time. Maybe I need to load up the photos by date taken and make a set for each 3-6 month period or something similar. I should probably go ahead and use their “resize me!” before uploading option to save on bandwidth. Since it doesn’t really do too much good to have the original jpg there since we have the original CR2 file on our machines. I guess it is handy for backup though.

I am just wondering if I should keep uploading photos there or perhaps I should just put up the ones I particularly like and keep the majority of them on our server. You know the ones I mean, we have pages and pages of baby Ethan and baby Jocelyn pics where they are in the same place with a slightly different expression on their face. Maybe overkill for the flickr account. If I don’t upload them all though, then if I’m looking for something and not at home, I won’t see them.

Oh, what a quandary. There you go, there’s my flickr dilemma. To their credit, I LOVE the whole community thing they got going. That part rocks. It’s just finding the photo I’m looking for in a timely manner, that is what is kicking my ass.

Do you use flickr? What do you think? Do you like it? How do you use it? Do you upload EVERYTHING or just some stuff? Are you a diligent tagger? Do you ever get annoyed at your photostream? I can’t think of any of my friends that use flickr, so I may be reaching out into the unknown readers, which I *beleive* there are some (maybe even FIVE!!), but have never actually said anything to me. I know you’re there. I SEE YOU IN MY STATS! So step out of the shadows and spill it, yo, I need the info!

OK. I’m done.

And I have a batch of photos that I’ll probably be uploading to flickr this evening 🙂

– amy loves loves loves the Canon 30D

A while back, I posted one of my (yes, there are many, people) crappy mom days. You remember, the one with the spanking?

Amalah posted about one of her bad days. I’m all in agreement with writing it out and letting other parents know that everything is not just supposed to be all rainbows and roses all the time. This stuff is HARD, and it can definitely wear you down.

I posted a comment with a link to my crappy day post, so if you are here for the first time, hi 🙂

-amy

Seriously, I am not a fancy person. I wear makeup at weddings, and sometimes I get on a make-up kick for everyday life, but it generally doesn’t last long. I wear nice clothes to work because they have rules about it, otherwise I’d be in jeans all the time. I have enough nice clothesthough, that generally getting ready is usually accomplished with minimal fuss and bother, and on the whole, I don’t mind wearing them. It’s fun. Today however, it was an a exercise in futility that made me want to shove the nozzle of the hair mousse into my eye socket and spray away in hopes that the chemicals would knock some sense into my brain, or at least save me from this clothes-fashion-indecisiveness that is decidedly NOT ME.

I changed my clothes THREE TIMES. I never do that. I put on what I choose, and if it doesn’t quite look the way I thought it would, tough, that’s what I’m wearing anyway.

THREE TIMES PEOPLE!

THIS IS NOT LIKE ME!

-amy

• The last song at most all the dances I went to (mormons are all about the youth dances), ended with Alphaville’s Forever Young.
• I have (with my friends, and their boys) sent a boy on a scavenger hunt where at the end is the big, “Will you go to X dance/date with me?” I can think of 2 distinct times, once for Sadie Hawkins in High School, and the other in college.
• I am secretly taking Glamour Shots photos in my basement.

Am I the only one who can totally relate to this whole movie, or are there others, out there, desperately seeking help?

* Guess which one of these isn’t true! When you get it right, you can go, “Yessssssss!”

Early on in this blog, I kind of wrestled with the whole, “oh my god this is on the internet and should i really be writing X or Y and if I do, what will happen?”

I usually go through this all over again everytime I’m pissed at James and want to rant. I don’t though, because that’s not fair to James, for me to tell you just my side and? he gets no chance to tell his. Generally, my rule of thumb is, if I’m thinking about writing about someone, I need to make sure that if they read it,? they won’t be peeved about it.

Generally, I think I’ve done pretty good, and at times I’ve just skirted the topic I really want to write about outright rather than tread in dangerous territory.

This weekend I came to some self realizations that I’d love to blather on about and therefore clear my mind and be able to move on to other things, but in coming to the realizations, it involves folks other than myself, and so I’m a bit squidgy about writing it all in true amy-mind-vomit style. The fact that it involves my family makes it even more difficult, so I’m more inclined to go the “full-stop” route.

Don’t you love it when someone says, “I want to write all these interesting things I’ve found about me. But I can’t. And I won’t. So NERRRRR.”

Seriously, why didn’t they just say nothing at all.

I suck 🙂

I think I *will* write it all, but I just have to figure out how first.

Betcha thought I’d spew about 2,000 words at you. It’s Monday, right? That’s the day that Amy tries to kill everyone with words, right?

Wrong!

Here are some flowers instead.

These are lilies that I bought in pots from Costco a few years ago, and after they died, I planted them by our front tree.

March 11 2006: This picture is showing my spring bulbs coming up (tulips and paperwhites) but look down there at the end? See the marker with a lily on it? See how there’s nothing down there? We’ll call this the “before” picture.

March 18, 2006: Another “before” picture of nothing where the lilies will one day be.

April 15, 2006: Look! Now there’s something growing! Right there, above the “Happy Father’s Day” stone, behold my glorious lilies!

May 4, 2006: They are really going now.

This past weekend: Finally, they explode into a burst of gorgeous orange color. I had forgotten what color they were. For some reason, I don’t really fancy yellow flowers, so I was very happy to see this sunburst of orange instead of the yellow I feared.

My clematis vines also decided they were done primping, and exposed themselves for the world to see:

It’s almost obscene, isn’t it? Aren’t they GORGEOUS?? I really need to get some proper trellises for them so they can really take off.
I am a happy gardener this week. I was feeling those mopey mopes when all the spring bulbs are done and are in that “Hi, I’ve bloomed and now I’m just waiting for the foliage to die down so I can disappear until next year, but until then I’m going to be all not really green but almost brown and dead but DONT TOUCH ME because then maybe I won’t bloom next year, haha!” phase, and my summer annuals are all in, but really need a month or two for their roots to develop before they will really get huge and take off late june/july but are now kind of puny and ho-hum..

So I was happy seeing these new developments 🙂

– amy has plans. Big plans.

Find your own pose!

Today was Ethan and Jocelyn’s end of year program at school. It was very cute. Pictures to come, I’m sure. That was how the morning was spent.

I took the entire day off. James went to work after the picnic at the school. I took the kids home. After naptime, I took Jocelyn to get her hair cut at the same place I get mine cut. When I’ve taken her to the kids hair cut place where I take Ethan, they seem to think she is a boy and cut off ALL her hair. She’ll never get her hair cut there again. Butchers.

However, with this new haircut, I can’t really tell a difference – Not from this place, and the old place. I can’t tell if her hair now is any different than it was before the haircut. In a way, that’s good, because I didn’t want them to cut it all off.

Jocelyn looks super cute in pig tails. However, she pulls them out after 2 minutes, EVERY TIME. Very frustrating.

We went to Target after the cutting of hair, and I let the kids get a toy each, as long as it wasn’t too expensive. I picked out Strawberry Shortcake for Jocelyn (with kitty, and a scooter!) and I kind of had my eye on a hot wheels race track I thought Ethan would like. He was into it, until he saw a Tonka box that had a whole slew of construction trucks. He decided he wanted that one instead. When we got home, he was totally absorbed with his new stuff. Jocelyn got her stroller and took her old doll out, threw it on the floor, put Strawberry in it, and pushed her around. Half hour later, she was done with Strawberry, and kept bugging Ethan by coming close to where he was playing, and looking at his stuff cross eyed. Just kidding, although I’m sure that would have bugged him too. She’d keep picking up stuff he wasn’t playing with and handing it to him and he’d get all mad whenever she touched anything that was his.

Ahhhhhh siblings.

This evening, I went to my friend Selena’s Sprintini party and drank a bit. I came home a little plastered. I broke one of her glasses. I don’t think I broke it in a drunken grand hand gesture, but one can never rely on drunk memory, can one.

So I’ve been home, with the nice buzz going, and therefore I’ve just spent the last hour brushing Strawberry Shortcake’s hair and doing it up in different ‘dos. I should have taken pictures, because Strawberry and I went through many many hairdos. Honestly, with beautiful fluffy pink hair like that, there really isn’t any way you can do it and have it look bad. Except when you do pigtails, because that exposes the slight bald spots she has in the back of her head, near the bottom. The Strawberry Shortcake makers put loooooots of hair along the front, but are pretty chintsy in the back. We’ve had a consultation about Rogaine, but we’ve decided that drugs are not the way to go. We will just work with her ASSETS to diminish her not-so-much-assets faults.* Better to do an UP do.

Just so you know, next time you have a Strawberry Shortcake Hair Emergency. Up ‘do’s = Gor-JEST!

The End.

UPDATE: I just read this over this morning and damn, so many errors. I’ve corrected a bunch of them.

* Last night writing this sentence, I COULD NOT remember the word “faults” and so I said, “not-so-much-assets”. The mind boggles. The drunken mind however, just makes shit up.