Change! 😡

😡 Blogger's Emoji file of smiley faces states this is a pouting face. I'll admit it's my frustrated look. I seem to implode frequently especially when I'm surprised with Change.

I take comfort in the assurance of Hebrews 13:8 (NIV), "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." Not so much Wal-Mart's online Photo Center! 😡

In retirement fall has become my favorite season of the year. We have taken some great road trips during the fall these last three years. For nearly a decade it has been my habit to create a photo book of these trips. This year that plan was delayed...a lot. First I returned home in October with a hacking cough that persisted for several weeks. Unobligingly I shared it with my wife. Her bout lasted about three weeks as well.

After all that cleared up we took some shorter road trips. We went to Gatlinburg and then North Carolina in December with our daughter and grandchild. This past January found us in New Orleans celebrating out 49th anniversary. following that trip, my old nemesis procrastination reared its ugly head followed by this pandemic and its quarantine.

During these last two months of safer at home, when I seem to have all the time in the world, procrastination returned with a vengeance. Yesterday I conquered it and spent several hours at the computer intending to start my fall 2019 photo book. That adventure didn't go so well.

I have created all nine of the previous volumes online at Wal-Mart Photo Center. We'd become like old friends over the last decade. I knew how to make the book: cover, layout, design, adding photos, the whole ball of wax. That candle melted at both ends when I discovered that WM had adjusted every phase of their photo book template. I couldn't figure out anything. Looking around proved fruitless. Pushing buttons got me nowhere. Change! Inevitable but dastardly 😡!

Today my goal is to investigate Snapfish. It's a rival site that children of mine have used and recommended in the past. The beauty of it is that IF Snapfish has changed, I won't even know it. I pray God will send my guardian angel to guide my keystrokes and make the process simple and rewarding...like it used to be. Before the CHANGE 😡 !

photo from brandongaille.com

Better Late Than Never

Better late than never! That's how I feel about finally beginning my new blog of the book (more like a novella) I've been working on since 2006. That's right, I started that effort 14 years ago. It's still a work in progress. I'm not at all sure it will ever come to a conclusion. To be a real book/novel it would probably need to triple in length, and I don't think I have that much life left in me. It took me so long to get this far. At that same rate of writing pages, I would be 99 at completion.

At least I finally landed on a doable method for self-publication. Imagine! is a fantasy novella in serial blog format about heaven, Jesus, and "in the beginning." Over those 14 years my nose to the grindstone toiling has been sporadic at best. Keying the thoughts and words has been an on and off process with more off than on most weeks. Remember I was working full time and traveling a lot. I had to visit our 11 grandchildren regularly who live in four different states none of which is Tennessee. All of that takes time. Now that I'm retired, I'm back at it with a vengeance! It's taken me nearly three more years of leisure to actually transform this dream into a reality without adding a single page to the manuscript. Oh, well!

That doesn't surprise me much. I was generally one to need a deadline to approach before getting out my grindstone. Except when my heart was really in a project, I would procrastinate until the zero hour was imminent. Two times in my life my actions varied from that wait until it's almost too late scenario with remarkable results.

The first was in my college British History class. When assigned Prime Minister Clement Atlee as my research paper topic, I jumped all over it. Except for some eating and sleeping, I spent the next 36 hours totally absorbed in that assignment mostly in the college library. I guess I wanted to prove something to myself and to my favorite professor Dr. Ray Muncy. I was not a history major, but I could research and write. My diligence paid off with a grade of "A" on the paper. Additionally I won the history research award at semester's end much to the chagrin of all my history-major friends.

The other memory I have of dusting off the grindstone was in planning my Arctic Ocean Road Trip in 2011. With my copy of the Milepost, other maps, and tour guides opened around me, I detailed the 12,000 mile 28-day journey as though my life depended on it. That May/June I had an amazing, once in a lifetime, solo road trip from Columbia, TN, to Deadhorse, AK, on the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay. A main trivia fact I learned first hand. It takes five days to enter Alaska from Tennessee if you average driving 1,100 miles a day. Call me Crazy!

Those two life-changing times aside, my track record is that I work better when a meaningful deadline looms on the immediate horizon. But as with yesterday's start of my serial blog Imagine!, better late than never. Much better!