Another weekend gone. Another dreary week ahead.

This weekend I spent, or wasted, a lot of time on the computer. Most of it was just vegetating. Some of it was purposeful. The computer hard drive was getting full – I was getting low memory messages when I uploaded photos to iPhoto. I checked, and there was only about 700mb space remaining. So I put in a lot of time deleting duplicate items and video clips and clutter. I moved my iPhoto library to the backup external hard drive, usually something I do annually, but I haven’t done so in a couple of years. Ultimately I opened up 85 gigs on the 320 gig drive. iPhoto is definitely more responsive now.

Today, Sunday, I trimmed shrubbery in the front yard. It’s kind of something to help get the house looking better, but it’s also just regular maintenance. Of course, it’s maintenance that I don’t do very often, so it was kind of a big job.

So yeah, trimming hedges and dinking around on the computer. Some productivity, eh?

Oh, I also uploaded some photos from an Alaska trip four years ago to Flickr. It was one of those things I just never got around to. In fact, seeing that folder on my computer desktop helped me realize that it was about four years ago, in 2010, that my enthusiasm for almost everything began to wane dramatically. I don’t know why. I can’t think of a pivotal or dramatic or significant cause or specific event. It’s just… I stopped being enthusiastic. An outward symptom was that my interest in photography and in sharing photos on Flickr began to fade. For what it’s worth, the number and quality of Pinky:st toy photos I create and upload seems to be a fairly reliable gauge of my overall sense of well-being. This weekend I edited and uploaded over a hundred photos of Trippy the Traveling Plastic Lizard from the 2010 Alaska trip. Travels with Trippy are as exciting and fun as travels with Pinky:st figures. I don’t know why I could never summon the enthusiasm to post the pictures. Partly I remember feeling that the trip was not particularly inspiring. In fact, Alaska is so similar to where I grew up in Oregon that I didn’t feel it was all that interesting. Finally, though I edited, captioned, and posted those photos that have been sitting on my computer for four years, reminding me of my lack of enthusiasm.

I’m hoping that my “forced enthusiasm” will generate genuine enthusiasm.

Oh, I also stumbled across the Big Red Hair web site created by a couple who write and draw comic books and who do other artsy-fun stuff, including compiling and creating vintage “dime novel” style books and building models of vehicles described in circa 1890s pulp adventure stories. In other words, these people make a living doing what I play around with for fun. Did I take some wrong turns in my life, or what?