November 18th

I am greatly enjoying doing the exercises in the Photoshop book/CD that I bought nearly two years ago. I hadn't meant to wait so long to go through it, but every time I would have a photo that cried out for some hocus-pocus in an editor, I had to do it quickly and so I just plowed forward using the old trial and error method. Now I know there are far faster and easier ways to get a decent photo, starting with one that is conspicuously wrong. I think I may take the advanced class on-line when I am through this and have practiced for a while.

Thinking of classes, I remember when I was a senior in high school, the English classes assigned a project about an author, you had to do research, make notes on index cards (which had to be turned in too) and write a paper about him/her. There was a list of authors to pick from, and I picked H.G. Wells. My friend Susan picked John Donne, don't ask me why (that's a joke, he of the "Ask not for whom the bell tolls?", OK, not much of a joke anyway) and we did the research together at the Miami-Dade Junior College library. No encyclopedias. When it came time to turn the papers in, Susan gave me hers to type (she couldn't type at all, and I almost could). But when I read it, it was awful! Incomplete sentences, one sentence as an entire paragraph, misspellings, etc. So, I changed it. I knew as much about her paper as my own, from helping her at the library. I smoothed it out, phrased it better, but it was still her work, I felt. Her mother called me and thanked me for the editing I did. She got an A from her teacher; I got a C. My teacher didn't like science fiction, I think. I complained, and so she sent my essay to another teacher (Susan's teacher, in fact) but the grade came back as a B, which I had to take. Like there was any doubt that another teacher would overrule mine. One of those growing up footnotes in life.



H.G. Wells

Bumper sticker for the day: "I do whatever my Rice Krispies tell me to."