The word of the day was "mask." What could that possibly mean besides opening up the Gimp and playing away? But I had to wait until the next day because I was busy all day yesterday trying to do homework for my class that met this evening, cursing myself for waiting until the day before. I really did work myself up into a fine state, anxious and whiny and worried and emotional! I'm not sure that anyone at work saw this state of being as my general work demeanor operated just fine. I gave everyone my full attention. I worked extra hard to prepare my classes. I dealt with the printer/copier crisis, coming up with back-up plans for everyone affected (wondering all the while why we hadn't just spent the extra $50 to get next-day-delivery of the needed toner given the hoops we had to jump through in a week when everyone is giving a test). I got a second version of the test written and sent out to everyone. I wrote some materials for today and got them out to the assistant in time. I was super competent! But I do wonder whether I gave these ordinary tasks extra special attention because I was avoiding my own class homework as much as a possibly could. I have a friend who calls this state of being "balance of terror," though it usually applies to the attractiveness of washing the kitchen floor when faced with a difficult piece of writing. The homework I had to do wasn't actually all that difficult, just full of uncertainties and unfamiliar decisions to be made on how to organize material. But it was time-consuming and I had put it off until the last minute. Definitely one of the things I have learned by being a student these past several years is that homework gets done at the last minute. Period. End of story. The only issue comes really when you don't estimate well how much time you need. I suppose another issue might be just how much perfectionism you feel compelled to put into the task. Having a generally over-achieving nature, I tend to put a bit more perfectionism into things than is required and find it difficult to be satisfied with "good enough" when I can think of another detail. Take the above picture, for example. The original picture actually had quite a bit more of the moss leading into the tree on a lovely diagonal, so an alternative crop might have been to put my lady in upper right of picture. But sometimes the reversible history is cut off and I would have had to do a lot of work to get her re-situated from scratch. So I gritted my teeth and said "good enough, stop already." Just as I did with the homework, due online at 4pm today, submitted at 3:23pm today giving me just exactly enough time to drive the half hour to the class that started at 4. I'm really quite relaxed now and cannot for the life of me recreate yesterday's overwrought state.
A spectacular creation both in picture and words. Now I know who to go to when I want to start learning Gimp. I have a version on my computer but I don't know the first thing about where to start with it. Now I have a guru!
