What's Easier These Days?

Photo: Mr. Dickie (Grotto of Lourdes, Emmitsburg, MD)

What's Easier These Days?
No matter what your life circumstances, no matter what you are going through right now, because of the work you've done on yourself, some things are easier, if only because your ability to roll with the punches has improved.

Take a few moments right now to look at your life as a whole and reflect on what has become easier. Your intimate relationships? Your parenting? Your effectiveness in dealing with a difficult person? Your ability to give up perfectionism? Whatever it is, take a minute to celebrate those things, and allow them to remind you that life can improve.

(M.J. Ryan, Instant Health and Happiness Boosters, 5 August)

The Internet can be such a wonderful tool, when everything is working. I never get tired of using Email. Being able to stay in closer touch with family and friends has been a wonderful blessing in all our lives. Yesterday we received photographs from Panama. This morning there was a thoughtful message from my college friend, Jim Rowe, who lives on the west coast in Renton, WA. I can share, in WebLogs or Groups: my thoughts, my Arrow Prayers, my genealogy work and photographs I've taken recently with the new digital camera. All I have to do is register with the service and take the time to learn how to use it. If you have a computer and haven't tried some of these things yet I encourage you to get involved. It's challenging to learn and gratifying when you get the knack of it.

Last night I used the free Google Picasa photo editor to improve many of the photographs I took during our recent vacation. Using the automatic settings on the camera seems to result in many underexposed photographs. There's a way to set the camera to compensate. I'm still learning about that. I found an easy way to use Picasa to correct the problems once the photos are on the computer. After I changed the photos I discovered that the last step is to click a button that saves a back up copy of each photo before saving another copy of the improved photograph. I modified about 70 photos. It took the laptop around twenty minutes to save all the work. I was able to walk away from the computer while that process was completed. Today's photo is one of those that I fixed. The statue is at the end of a walkway up the hill into the woods. It was quite shady and there was lots of afternoon backlight behind the cross. Thanks to the Picasa editing capability I was able to modify the photograph and improve it. Remember in the old days, the print of the shot would come back from the photo processor too dark to see and we'd either put it back in the envelope or throw it in the trash.

Mr. Dickie