Friday Forays In Fiction: Setting

This is my weekly check-in re my commitment to stay engaged with this year's NaNo novel, Mobile Hopes, until at least July 4rth 2009 when I'll reassess. The slide show represents the main task I've undertaken for it this week. I got the 250 odd pictures off my camera that were taken while on several walks in our mobile home park between mid October and mid December. Taking these pictures was a project aimed at giving me inspiration and providing things to describe for settings. I was supposed to have gotten them off the camera and put into a slideshow on my computer before NaNo started. Sigh.

I selected twenty-some to process from bitmaps to web jpegs for this post this evening. I was going to just upload them in one long list but then remembered this slide show maker my sister-friend Jamie introduced me to in November which I've kept meaning to check into.

There are two big deals in those simple statements--I transferred the pics off my camera without any help for the first time since I got my camera for Christmas a year ago. And I figured out how to make that slide show at slide.com and it was nearly painless. LOL.

I am so tech challenged in spite of what it may seem with me being a blogger and spending an average of ten hours per day on a computer. But every new thing I learned since being introduced to a computer in 1985 has been a challenge. Mostly though I think it is my anxiety about trying new things that might go terribly wrong with the click of a key or the misreading of an instruction. I can't blame it all on my visual impairment either because I had this issue before I lost 90% of my vision. I've had it since before I started kindergarten.

I even survived one of those 'thing's going wrong' events this week. While trying to get pictures of the new room setup I discussed last week in the posts called Jumbled, Jumbled II and Jumbled III, I ended up somehow getting my camera on the wrong setting and wore out the batteries trying to figure out why the flash wasn't working and why every time I clicked the button to take a picture it kept saying 'processing'. I discovered the problem when I uploaded the pics onto my laptop and found that several of the 'pictures' were actually videos.

I had to get Ed's help to get it off the video setting. But now that I have accidentally learned how to take videos with my camera, who knows, maybe soon I'll be using my YouTube account for more than just collecting cool videos to keep track of those other's have made.

I hope this willingness to try things I'm unsure of without help or someone nearby to yelp at in case things go wrong stays with me beyond today. I'm going to need it as I leave Ed behind for the next four to six weeks. The plan (unless the weather plays another trick on us) is for my sister-in-law to drive down here Sunday to take me up to Longview WA to help my sister care for my Mom during her recovery from a broken hip and mild stroke. I spent the day cleaning out the closet and my clothes drawers, doing laundry and packing. I could have done another Jumble post about that--you should have seen the Jumble Mountain on the bed for about five hours. I thought to take a picture of it at it's worse but I couldn't get to the camera.