A Girl...

Creative Pursuits

This Flickr thing is a lot less intuitive than it should be, but I'm getting the hang of it. What this means to you is that if you want to see my pictures and you already have an account, there's no need to email me a special request, wait for me to email you back, and then jump through a flaming hoop to a round of applause and a liver treat. Apparently, all you have to do is add me as a contact (username LeahK) and then I add you back. The other method is I go to your account and add you as a contact whether you want me to or not. Forcing myself upon people is how I show my love.

A big hug and kiss and three thousand gold stars goes to SAJ for being the first person to comment on my pictures and to favorite a photo (which just happens to be of my scrumptious gentleman caller (don't get excited; it's just Simon)). SAJ is all about spreading the warm fuzzies and I am all about getting validation over the world wide web.

The bad thing about Flickr is that the setup has about 846 levels of structure, which means I can title, describe, batch, set, tag, note, and comment on all of the photos individually. I say I can do all of those things, but if you know anything about how OCD works, you understand that the fact that I can organize means I must organize, and it took an impressive display of willpower to open access to my pages before everything was in a state of absolute perfection. The cross-referencing possibilities alone could keep me busy for years. I was the kid who, when she got done arranging her crayons by color, rearranged them by height, and then in alphabetical order according to the color name written on the label. Then I lined up my books by date of publication and then redid them in descending order of grade-level-appropriateness. This is the reason why I abandoned trying to add tags to my Flickr photos because it was quickly morphing from a handy tool to an excercise in madness. When I was in elementary school, every year our class entered a contest called Creative Pursuits, and one of the activities was brainstorming how many uses there are for, say, a popsicle stick (e.g., rung on a ladder for industrious mice). Yesterday I uploaded a picture of a flower from our trip to the conservatory, and in under sixty seconds I had tagged it "flower," "plant," "conservatory," "sf conservatory," "sf conservatory of flowers," "sf," "san francisco," "pink," "green," "color," "texture," "pretty," "macro," "flora," "nature," "INSANE," you get the idea. So, no more tags for me.

One thing that Creative Pursuits brainstorming talent is useful for, though, is winning games, like the one at baby showers where you have to spell as many words as possible using the parents' first names. Inevitably, as people go around the circle calling out their scores, it goes something like "Twelve," "Thirteen," "Fifteen" (ooh!), "Twenty-one" (oooooh!), "Seventeen," "Sixteen," "Eighty-two" *stunned silence.* They think I'm cheating and make me read off my answers and then everyone spends the rest of the party hating me for knowing a word like "dewlap." Or maybe it's that I suggested they name the baby Dewlap, since it's about as fetching as the other monnikers they picked out.

And hey, speaking of activities at baby showers, I just volunteered myself to be in charge of the Onesie Decorating Table at my coworker's shower. If anyone has any tips on fabric-friendly media (pens, markers, paints, etc.) or schemes for how to turn onesie deocrating into a game I can win and gloat about and alienate myself with, please let me know. And if anyone knows of an interface that allows Flickr to upload pictures through the power of suggestion, that would be good too.