What To Do?

I'm in a bit of a pickle here -maybe. Well, actually maybe not but I've come to a startling conclusion here of late with respect to blogs I follow and read.

It has to do with commenting on others blogs and the dilemma I frequently have of becoming brain dead as soon as I think about writing a post of my own.

One thing I don't do very often when I do get around to writing a post is to do a whole lot of referencing to other people's blogs to acknowledge getting the idea behind a particular post from this or that person.

Why is that anyway?

Well, it's mainly because of something I have a tendency to do while reading and then commenting.

I just recently realized if I just left a message to acknowledge I'd visited this or that other person's site, and not leave the long, long comments I am totally known for by those favorite other bloggers of mine, I could -provided I stopped right there in my tracks and headed to my own blog and clicked on "New Post" write a full post of my own, probably done without near as much of my normal meandering around with my own words too -also a trait I am pretty much known for -and that way, I'd not be suffering near as frequently from being in the "Brain dead" status with respect to my own posts.

Make sense?

It does to me but that doesn't mean I will necessarily be able to remember that and adhere to that theory then too.

Odds are I'll still continue with the long-winded commentary and I'm really not sure why I do that. Probably because to do otherwise would make my life, I think, immeasurably easier and sheesh, I sure as hell don't want to do anything quite that drastic, ya know.

But, speaking of making my life easier, I do have one thing to say about that.

I'm still playing with all the various things involved in this cookbook preparation for our church women's group.

Although I had set a deadline of some unrememberable date in July for accepting recipes, it is now known to those straggler contributors of recipes that I will take recipes up until the day before I am ready to ship this cookbook off to the publisher. (I'm also still accepting ads and copy, etc., along with checks for that too even though I had set a deadline for that as August 10th. But those deadlines were actually just "preliminary" deadlines for me in an effort to maybe get people to get up and move and provide me the information I needed.

Right now, I've been working -struggling is a more accurate word there -with the technical parts of this cookbook -setting up special pages in it. One of these special pages is intended to be a dedication page to many of the women who served our church, the women's group, and served in long and well for many years. To do that, the idea was to make up a collage by gathering as many pictures as we could of as many of those grand ladies of our past as possible and arranging it on a specific special page.

To do that also required that I try to get some knowledge, working ability to find and deal with some kind of photo software -akin to Photoshop- ya know. My next door neighbor's son, who is quite the computer geek/nerd (if you will) had told me he doesn't have Photoshop due to not having approximately $700 to lay out to purchase it but he highly recommended that I download a free software program called GIMP -which I did.

Now, you wanna see someone brain dead, unable to think, much less write, you should have seen me the other night when I tried to work with this GIMP program for the first time! EGADS! The air in my living room was not just a pale shade of blue but nearing to turn to NAVY blue thanks to my airing my frustrations by using a whole hell of a lot of four letter words that the grandkids would have been shaking their fingers at me and screaming "Red Word, Red Word! Grammy used another Red Word!" (Their terminology for any of my curse words which I do try somewhat to keep at a dull roar when they are present because both of them, but especially Kurtis, tend to become big-time parrots with respect to that kind of vocabulary. Talk about leaving me with a very limited vocabulary, that really does it to me a times!) But anyway, thankfully they were both in bed, sound asleep, when I started trying to figure out how to work with this GIMP software.

After spending 5 hours, fiddling around, cursing a whole lot, and only having managed to get a grand total of 7 pictures manipulated to show only a head shot of the person I was focusing on in those pictures and moved across to a separate page to build my collage, I came to the conclusion that the reason those software engineers, in their infinite wisdom, had named that program GIMP is because trying to learn how to use it does indeed make one's brain go completely to mush and therefore you have a GIMPY brain -with little to no function!

Thankfully, yesterday I did play with the lovely GIMP program again and for the better part of the day and I did manage to develop my own methods of working with said program too that enabled me to end up with a little over 50 pictures that I manipulated into just head shots and saved over to my collage page! Progress does take infinitely much longer to occur when one is old and borderline senile! I'm just thankful though that the software the publisher of our masterpiece provides to clients to use if they wish to enter the recipes themselves was extremely easy to master for me -mainly because I have worked in data entry positions for a great deal of my former worklife and the abilities I had in that type of employment really were a tremendous asset for me to realize they still existed in my skills area! Translated that means I managed to enter what is now nearing 600 recipes with only a few times when I maybe uttered one or two curse words. Yeah, that's how I measure difficulty in just about anything I tackle -how many times I curse while doing something!

So now, I'm going to have to try to learn how to deal with advertising copy and how to work with that on my lovely computer too next. It's going to be a bit more on the ordeal side for my mind to work on that stuff and it won't be helped by the fact that tomorrow, our minister is going to be here to try to help me figure out how to work with those ads and copy and such.

Well, there goes my release valve then I suspect!

I'm liable to end up with a coronary or in old time medical terms, suffering from apolexy -can't even spell that now but it's a word I picked up a few years ago from reading many, many gossip-type columns in old, old local newspapers for a research project I was working on back then. I think it actually mean when they used that word that the person had suffered from a massive stroke.

And if I don't return -don't come read your blogs, leave my trademark of the lengthy commentary on your posts, or don't resurface again with any new posts of my own, you'll know, understand then, that I was done in -totally -with an apoploptic fit brought on by not being able to curse and let off my frustrations of dealing with the brain dead side of my being!

But if that happens, just remember this, I really did enjoy reading and leaving all those comments and semi-blog posts at your place!