I Do Too Sleep! - Yippee, my monthly newsletter is published!

It has finally dawned on me that it's the PICTURES that I agonize over, for hours and hours. I take the time to go through album after album online. I pick out the best images that either capture the spirit of the day, feature our King and Queen, feature our local Baronial members (or their close friends), or just amuse me. I crop, I edit, I futz, and I clean the images. I resize them so that my final newsletter isn't a gigantic PDF. I import them, arrange them, re-arrange them, caption them, and then make certain the credits go to the correct photographer and page citation. I make sure the links to the online albums work. To sum up, I need to budget more time for photo editing.

So, I've put out the March issue, started the skeleton files for April, and set up a list of probably photo tasks of the events we might have in the next month. I've sent some emails to one or two authors, artists, or supporting columnists. And I have three albums to start working on for next month's issue. There were so many wonderful features in the March issue, I couldn't include photos from the event just four days ago. So I'll start them next.

I *did* sleep, contrary to any rumors my Baron might be entertaining. I actually went to sleep around 11:30 pm, so it was no effort at all to be awake at 4:30 am, showered, dressed, and curling my hair by 5. However, 5:30 am is WAY TOO DARK to be a normal time for driving to work. Seriously! This time change is ridiculous. When I turned out my bedroom light, it was COMPLETELY pitch black looking out at the living. There was no ambient light from any source at all, and completely disorienting. The traffic was fantastic at that hour, but of course far fewer places are open at 5:30 that server coffee or breakfast. All my coffee making supplies are already in boxes and on the truck to Gulf Wars, so I have to get coffee on the road for the intervening week.

(Oh, if you want to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, head over to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Tydes/ ... that's the current method for subscribing.)

Next Up - Major project for Pentathlon, must be finished tonight/tomorrow so I can hand it off to the team. I'm just a few TV shows away from finishing the last stitch.

Paycheck arrives tomorrow, and I can buy my ticket into the Whiskies of the World Expo. This will be my silly, fun, non-SCA trip with three guys (and then some) I know from the SCA. But it's a modern convention, modern dress, modern hotel, and I expect it to be WAY fun. I attended a private whiskey tasting hosted by a couple of the guys last year, and it was very educational. Not all of them are to my taste, but I learned how to taste and evaluate what I liked!

This weekend is Black Oak Lodge, where I'll be cooking dinner on Friday night, participating in the Bardic competition on Saturday, taking some arts and sciences classes, hanging out with friends, enjoying fabulous food, cabin camping (a rarity in our Kingdom), and generally relaxing. Here's photos from 2008, 2006, and 2004. (Hmm, I wonder where all my alternate year photos are? I'll have to look into that.)

Sunday afternoon is little Benji's first birthday, so I'll come home to see him for his party. I can hardly believe it's been a year since he was born and we welcomed him into our extended family. He's MUCH bigger now, and I can see more photo ops in his future.

(Of course, my nephew Jack is much bigger now too, and it's only been seven weeks since we welcomed him into our family.)

And then I leave Wednesday night (next week) for Gulf Wars. Woot!

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Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: Fausta and Pierre, my proof-readers extraordinaire today. And then for Amya, Meala, and Auggie catching the typos that slipped through. Hooray for stealth copy/paste for file updates!