Lift Up Your Hearts!

This summer I noticed that our grandson was reading a book about "staycations."  I think it was about how to have a great vacation but save money by staying in your own town, and your own home, but acting as if you were on vacation:  eating out, seeing the attractions that you would see if you were visiting your city as a tourist, etc.  However, my mind leapt at a different interpretation of the term:  What if I "went on vacation" but never left home?

To me, vacations are not only fun but critically important, being mostly about family, but they are anything but relaxing.  I leave behind one set of responsibilities, but take on another, and if grandchildren are a joy that reminds me life is worth living, they don't leave much time for rest.  Or for making any progress on my own work, which is always waiting for me when I return.  So when Porter planned a three-week "working vacation" to the Northeast to help with construction projects in New Hampshire and to help out his father in Connecticut, I thought, "What a great time for me to take a staycation!"  Hard as it was to give up any chance to visit family, this was too good an opportunity to miss.  I would be home, but not home, avoiding as much as possible any normal activity or chore that I would not be doing if I were actually away.  If it could survive three weeks of my being out of town, it could survive being ignored for that long.

There were exceptions.  If we had both been out of town, things like mail, newspaper, lawn/pool care, and feeding the worms would have been taken care of, but it made much more sense to handle them myself.  A friend pointed out that I could have hired someone to mow the lawn, but that would have been more stressful than just doing it.

I didn't have a hard-core agenda; this was supposed to be a vacation, after all, a personal retreat, and I wanted to leave it somewhat fluid.  But I did have a few goals.

1. This seemed like the perfect time to accomplish 95 by 65 Goal #94:  Rocket boost photo work (40 hours of work in segments of 1 or more hours, over 2 weeks), since I could work largely without interruption and any hours of the day I chose.
2. There are some projects that work a lot better if I can spread them over space and time without worrying about interfering in someone else's life.  I wanted to work on some of these.
3. I've been battling a tendency toward hoarseness ever since I got the worst laryngitis of my life four years ago, and being alone at home with no outside commitments looked to be my best chance to see what a period of voice rest could do to help.

These were my three big priorities.  How did I do?

1. I knew from my experience with Goal #86, Rocket boost genealogy that the hour-long segment requirement doesn't work for me, so I gave myself the freedom work in segments of any length.  That worked great.  Sometimes it was ten minutes, sometimes several hours, but I met the goal and never experienced the burnout I did with the genealogy work.  It also helped that I had mostly cleared my schedule, so guilt over not doing other things was not part of the picture.  Also, in this case the hardest, most tedious work came at the beginning, instead of at the end.  I spend approximately 56 hours on this project over the three weeks, and here's what I did.  (If it doesn't seem like that much to you, you don't know the magnitude of the project; trust me, it was a big deal, and I'm very happy with it.)
   • Set up a set of working files on a new 2TB drive I had bought for this purpose.  Having all that space gave me the freedom to make as many interim backup copies as I wanted to, which took away the fear of messing things up badly.  It's impossible to overstate how lovely this was.
   • Learned to use Irfanview to make lossless JPG rotations, and batch-process name changes.  Again, it's impossible to overstate the value of these tools, especially the batch processing.
   • I researched and decided on a system for identifying all my photos with the date and time as the first part of the filename.  Maybe that's old school—they say that the date and time, along with people, places, and other keywords, should be stored as EXIF data associated with the file—but I've been burned before with having information lost when I switched systems.  Maybe that won't happen with EXIF, but I also like to be able to see and search for that information easily. 
   • I decided that I would begin with what is probably the easiest part of my many, many years of backlog:  2015 photos from my phone.  They have date-and-time information stored with each image, and in most cases location information as well.  What's more, the more recent memories are easier to recall than those from, say, 2007, or even worse, 1975....  I then processed all of the 2015 photos from January through mid-September, giving them all filenames that looked like this:  yyyy-mm-dd@hh-mm-ss (with appropriate extension).  Do I need to know what second a photo was taken?  No, but the point is to be able to sort photos by the order in which they were taken.  It's also an easy way of making sure each has a unique filename, so I no longer have to worry about appending numbers after each photo in a series, and adding further suffixes when I find something that belongs in between two consecutive numbers.  It's liberating and I haven't yet found a downside.  Unless it might make the filename too long; I've also put sometimes lengthy descriptions in the filenames.  Long names have gotten me in trouble before, with certain copy/backup programs with less generosity in that department than Windows.  But so far I've been okay with this.
   • I made a quick-and-dirty cull of pictures that were obviously bad.  I mean really quick:  mostly pictures that were taken accidentally.  Trying to choose the best from a set of basically the same shot was not appropriate for this step.  This was the end of Phase 1.
   • In Phase 2, I went through all the renamed photos, culling still more (but still being very generous in what I kept), and changing the filenames to include descriptions:  people, places, events, anything to help place the photo in context.  I'm actually still in Phase 2, having at this point not quite completed from January through May.  I had hoped to finish this phase of 2015, but another major project was spawned when I hit April, and our genealogical visit to a cemetery.  Before declaring those photos complete, it only made sense to analyze the data and put together the whole story of our findings.  That in itself took almost 20 hours.
   • Phase 3 will consist of going through the photos again and making edits so that the images show best what is important to me in the picture.  For example, I have one photo of the family eating at a large table, and in itself it's not worth keeping because too many people were caught not looking very attractive.  But properly cropped, there's an adorable picture of a sleeping grandson.  Finally, Phase 4 will be the Production stage, in which I choose photos to share with others in some attractive form.
   • For Phases 3 and 4 I purchased PaintShop Pro.  It's intimidating, but I've been helped a lot by instructional videos available on YouTube.  For those who might be in similar straits, Christopher Oneill's YouTube channel has a lot of detailed information.  Too detailed, maybe, but I've found nothing else that covers the material as well.  And if I can multi-task, say eating lunch while watching, it makes it less frustrating that he is sometimes repetitious and slow.
   • Why do I do everything in phases, making several passes through the images?  Because I have a very, very large elephant to eat, and it goes down better one small bite at a time.
   • Yes, I'm making sure to back up my work.
   • Maybe best of all, I now have a set of procedures and a system for continuing to make progress, albeit at a much slower rate, now that my retreat is over.
2. Working on house projects was a great success, as detailed below.  Projects involving the kitchen and the master bedroom are particularly likely to annoy other people if they're spread out over several days.
3. The jury is still out on my throat.  I've made progress, but not as much as I'd like.  That's not going to stop me from going back to choir this week, however.  I plan to keep up my regimen of salt-water gargles, xylitol nasal spray, and lots of drinking.  For the last, I'll keep up the regular tea, and the lemon and honey, but I will be glad to see the back of the make-me-gag herbal tea that is supposed to help soothe throats.  Maybe I'll have to go back to that, but I'm sure hoping not.  One problem I did discover was that being home alone did not mean I didn't use my voice:  I talk to myself a lot!  I pray out loud, and I often keep a running commentary on what I do and how it's going.  As I've said before, I think in words, and it turns out that when I'm alone I like to hear those words aloud.  I kept catching myself and reminding myself not to talk, but it's a pretty strong habit.  At least my volume is lower than when speaking to someone else....

In answer to the question you all are asking, "What did you do on your retreat?" here's what I can remember.

• Set up system for labelling and identifying photos
• Learned a lot about PaintShop
• Culled bad photos from 2015; labelled the remainder with date and time; labelled January through most of May with description
• Analyzed, augmented, and wrote up the genealogical data from our cemetery visit in April; also did some general genealogy work
• Maintained a schedule of daily Bible reading and prayer
• Maintained a schedule of daily exercise, only twice logging less than 90 minutes and 10,000 steps
• Completed two major yard projects
• Mowed the lawn twice
• Cleaned the pool three times
• Maintained a schedule of daily language learning with DuoLingo
• Exchanged our defective toaster oven
• Bought a bunch of clothes—those who know me will understand what an extraordinary accomplishment this is
• Wrote 12 blog posts
• Read and reviewed one book—below average for me, but it was not a priority for this retreat
• Completed six kitchen-related projects—some large, some small
• Completed a major project in the master bedroom/bath
• Created four Shutterfly projects
• Cooked some dishes to freeze for future quick meals
• And a lot of little things

Because my 95 by 65 goal required me to log at least 40 hours of photo work, and I didn't want to limit myself to either one-hour time blocks or very tedious record-keeping, I looked into time-tracking software.  I found Gleeo Time Tracker, and I absolutely love it!  I think so much of it that I will be writing a review, so I won't go into details here, but it does what I need, it doesn't do what I don't need, and anyway how can you go wrong with a Swiss timepiece?  I began with the photo work, and gradually added (and am still adding as time goes on) more categories and tasks, so the numbers below are, except for the photo hours, understated.  By how much depends on when I added them to the time tracker, and of course there were plenty of other things I did that didn't get recorded.  But what there is, is enough to give a pretty good feeling for how the three weeks went.

I logged an average of about 12 hours per day.  There is some duplication, as when it was appropriate I counted each task separately when multi-tasking.  For example, I often do reading and exercise simultaneously, but they are clearly different activities and it's important for me that I count them both.  Exercise and yard work I only counted as yard work, even though I expended a lot of energy and wound up very tired, because they were the same activity, not two activities occurring simultaneously.  I could have counted the PaintShop instructional videos as either Learnig or Photo Organization, but I chose the latter.  And so on.  There were also many activities that didn't get logged.

Even with some duplication taken into account, these were long days.  I worked from morning till bedtime.  I read only one book, and never turned on the television.  When I sat down to watch a video, 99% of the time I was learning about PaintShop.  (There were a few short videos of terribly cute grandchildren as a change of pace.)  My staycation was no more relaxing than our vacations.  It was wonderful, it was restorative, and I feel great about what I accomplished.  But relaxing it wasn't.  I guess I'm just not cut out for rest.

Or maybe I just need rest in the right circumstances.  Porter came home last night, and this afternoon we sat down together and watched an episode of NCIS.  I have to admit that was just lovely!