Another week of solid learning!

I had started to edit one of my earlier chapters, chapter five, late last week. It was like pulling teeth. It was pretty de-motivating to read something that I had already edited thoroughly three times to find that it was so incredibly bad. It did not flow, the points were poorly made and most points were just lost in the words. Surprisingly, I was not really perturbed.

One of my goals this year is to learn Xhosa. Luckily my eldest son’s school has offered Xhosa to parents as a course. Lesson two was last week and heaps of fun. Also being the only boy in the class helps a lot. It sure feels funny to be back at school but at least this time, I want to be there!

I was given the opportunity to take class photographs for the children at my youngest son’s school this week. That required some nifty preparation work over the last few weeks as I have had to learn about light and portraits. I kidnapped my wife to be my safety blanket on this assignment. She understands all of the mommy things about pictures, like hairstyles, clean faces, and wiped noses. Stuff that floats past me in the ether. We made a great team and took some wonderful pictures! I learnt oh so much!!!

Back at our office, I needed to learn how to process just under 400 photographs to ensure that the pictures are brilliant in as little time as possible. To that end, I have learnt how to use a simple function in Photoshop called ‘actions’. Simply put, this is a way of setting up your system so that I push one button and it does all sorts of time consuming things in the background. It has revolutionised my processing abilities!

And then I went back to my problem chapter. Spent a couple of hours reorganising and culling and ended up with something pretty good. When I read it through again last night, it sounded incredibly wise!

There can only be one explanation, somebody fiddled with it the night before!!