Abbie's Real Life Blog

Damn you, iTunes!  I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent in 2010 messing with stupid iTunes, and yet I have not switched to a different music management tool.  I have, however, stopped buying music through iTunes because it is such a bitch of a program.  I now buy through Amazon.  I am not sure if it’s really all that great, but it is certainly better.  Anyway, I’m rebuilding my iTunes library again.  It takes days of time, first to copy over the files and then to remove all the duplicates and then to rebuild all the playlists.  It’s really no fun whatsoever.

In Photoshop news, the expensive jump to Photoshop CS5 does seem to have solved my problem, but has also created a host of new ones by not being compatible with some of the plugins that I bought.  So yay for that, too.

I made red velvet cupcakes for the picnic the other night.  I was not impressed, but I am not a fan of chocolate desserts.  I want my chocolate to be actual chocolate, not adulterated with flour and baking powder.  Brownies are at the edge of my preferred chocolate dessert continuum, and even then you can end up with fairly dull brownies.  The problem is that people use just enough cocoa to turn the batter brown, but not enough to give you a real chocolate flavor.  I need it to taste right.  Anyway, red velvet boxed cake mix doesn’t go far enough for me.  Also, I was a little appalled at the fact that the batter looked like ketchup.  No more red velvet for me.  But tomorrow I am supposed to attend an ironic Twilight-movie party (we are watching the second one with the Rifftrax) and I am considering making some kind of Twilight-themed dessert.  I guess red velvet would make the most sense, though I am not sure I want to relive the ketchup batter.

I am so far behind on my 365 project right now.  Even with a week off spent entirely post-processing, I am not sure I could catch up.  Okay, that would probably be enough time, actually, but I don’t have a week off and I’m not going to take that kind of time.  I have been pretty unmotivated to take decent photos in the past couple of weeks as well.  Usually I managed to set up some off-camera lighting if I put off taking a photo until late at night, but all this month I have not managed to do much more than slap a speedlight and diffuser on the camera itself and snap away at something random.  I guess that my photo-obsessed month of June and the fact that I have thousands and thousands of untouched photos sitting on my laptop right now, well, it doesn’t really put me in the frame of mind to run out and take a bunch more if I won’t even get to them until September, if I’m lucky.  Maybe I’ll make some progress this weekend.

This Sunday is the Really Really Free Market in Columbia.  The idea is that you take all your stuff down there and set it out and people take what they want.  I am considering this, not as someone who wants stuff, but as someone who has stuff I could probably do without.  Quite a lot of it, actually.  My friend mentioned participating in it a few months ago, and it sounded intruiging.  I guess I will see how motivated I am!