All Work and Little Play

I feel like all I've done is work this weekend.

Friday night I was on my own as Marlin was at a friend's stag.  I took the dogs for a quick romp after work (it was a long 11 hour day I might add) and then sat down at the computer to do more work.  I recently purchased a "shopping cart" for my photography business and while I've been working on setting it up for weeks, it still wasn't completely ready.  It is a slick system that allows you to pick whether you want a digital image or print or canvas or really anything I want to sell.  You chose your images and your sizes and then you just pay by PayPal. I know it will be great eventually, but man there is a lot of stuff to customize and I was finding things on Friday night that I didn't even know I needed to do.

On Saturday morning I woke up, delivered papers and then went to the daycare.  The reason I was working so hard the night before on the shopping cart, was because we were having a Lethbridge Pugster Meet-Up at the daycare.  So I went in early to do some stuff that I've been putting off for a while. Fun stuff like moving gravel, hanging up a towel rack that had fallen down, touching up some paint, dusting, etc.

The event was a lot of fun.  I asked if I could take photos so I got to hang out, chat and play with the pups.  But man, am I not thrilled with the photos. I usually shoot in Manual, but I was really struggling because the dogs were running inside and out, and when they were inside, how close they were to the open door really made a difference in the lighting.  I was initially trying to change settings back and forth, but I just couldn't keep up and was constantly taking pictures in the wrong setting.  So I switched to a different mode to make my photo taking easier but it sure made my processing harder! (More on that in a moment.) And I really need to figure out a system with 14 dogs running around.  I just went from cuteness to cuteness, but I think I need to spend more time systematically focusing on individual dogs instead of just randomly taking pictures.

When that was over, Marlin and I went vehicle shopping.  Which was kind of fun, but really not very relaxing.  We were there until they closed and were no closer to figuring out what we wanted and needed.  Sigh.

Today, Marlin and I finally tackled some yard work.  We got the patio furniture out, cleaned up the garage, picked up poop, mowed the lawn and pulled some weeds. It was hot.  So in the afternoon, I came back in to work on the pug pictures.

Due to the settings on my camera, there were so many under and over exposed photos I felt like just ditching the whole batch.  Combine that with the fact that the daycare really doesn't make a pretty background, I ended up doing a lot more editing that usual.  Which is fine, but it took me forever.

But the really frustrating part came when I tried to upload the pictures to my new shopping cart site.  The first attempt took an hour (during which I joined Marlin on the patio for a drink, so time was well spent).  But it didn't work.  So I tried again. This time I puttered on the computer for an hour while waiting.  That didn't work either. So I tried just uploading 6 pictures.  Nope, no luck.  Then I tried just one photo. Still no luck.

I FINALLY went to the help area and after searching for some time, I discovered that my file sizes were too big.  Big Sigh.  One of the things I loved about this system was that people would be able to download digital files immediately after purchasing and I wouldn't have to do a thing.  What they failed to mention is that it is only going to work for the low resolution images.  Sigh. Not the end of the world, but a little frustrating.

Now I still need to vacuum, make dinner and get my 52 weeks photo of Lacey.  I was hoping to get some stuff loaded into the trailer this weekend but there just wasn't time.

I hope the week is more relaxing than the weekend!