My blog is often my creative outlet, a way of making sense of the world. Taking an issue, wrestling with the details, framing it a certain way, putting a personal stamp on it. It is also stress relief. I talk through some of the things that are bothering me, a monologue with myself that I share publicly. Sometimes they provoke reactions, likes on FB or a comment or two. Many times they don’t. While I would love to have thousands of people hanging on my every written word, I write most of the time for me. A diary of sorts. Maybe a legacy that my son will some day read, wondering, “What did Dad think about that?”.
Yet because I write for me, sometimes as potentially the only one who will read the post, I also cannot hide in sophistry or metaphor. I believe strongly in as much transparency in relationships as they can handle, sometimes more than is comfortable, and that transparency has to apply to my relationship with myself. But even though it is sometimes hard, I know that my writing is good for me. An outlet of release.
Which is why I am posting something when I really don’t feel like posting or doing anything. I want to curl up in a ball and shut out the world. If it wasn’t for COVID, I’d probably want to go somewhere for a week, turn off my phone, and just shut down. To simply “be”, find my centre, and let my body and mind recharge. A form of CTRL-ALT-DELETE for my internal software and external hardware.
Except life doesn’t work like that, of course. You can’t run away from problems, and if they’re mental noise, they end up going anywhere you go too. I’ve often wondered if I’d be better off having an interest in alcohol occasionally. Something to just overwhelm the brain and shut it off for awhile. I tend to mute it through distraction instead, binge-watching something or a project. But I’m having trouble filtering the noise right now.
A good portion of it is COVID, of course. I feel like I want to go to a mall and just walk around. No shopping, no interactions with anyone, just go and walk around. Do something somewhat normal. I won’t, we are still a high-risk household, after all.
Some of it is the winter. I do tend to get squirrelly in February, although I’m barely noticing other than having to clear snow off the car. I barely even know it is winter or anything outside of the pod.
But my issues with my leg are getting to me. I can wrap my head around the compression socks, maybe not well, maybe not right away, but it’s noise. I did my fitting today for some custom socks, yay, and it’s not a big deal in the long run. Same shit, different day. Whatever.
I was able to wrap my head around the trips to wound care, constant wrapping, the extra hassles with showering, etc. Mostly because I could see a light at the end of the tunnel. My leg was improving, the wound was healing, the compression was helping.
And then last week blew that to hell in a handbasket.
My wound started to get angry and red again, I had multiple appointments by phone with my doctor to go back on the antibiotic horse pills for another 14d. I also had multiple “rush” appointments with the wound care people after I had to rip the compression off on Saturday and again today because the wound was starting to hurt like the Dickens. I think the bandage is somehow slipping under the compression over time, and it is “pulling” at the wound. My nurse thinks it is because I’m not keeping my legs elevated during the day, which while working at a desk for 8h isn’t a great combo.
So where does that leave me? Basically with a wound that is almost back to square one and the likelihood that my next stop is going to be an ER sometime. Who the f*** knows what they’ll actually do for me if I go, since I’m already receiving wound care and antibiotics. I suppose IV antibiotics is a possibility.
Yet when I look at that list, you know what I see?
Whining.
It’s not that serious in the end. There are people out there with real serious health problems and I’m not talking about simply COVID. I’m talking about chronic pain conditions. Things they deal with and live with, and I can’t help but wonder.
If I’m this much of a basket case with a simple leg wound, what will I be like when I get to a point with REAL problems to live with?
That is what is frying my mental bacon. The weakness, the face of the future, my comfort and ability to handle mental stress and emotional turmoil but which seems to fail me completely when dealing with physical discomfort.
With a slightly serious segue, it is made me think about the MAID legislation that is going through. Medical Assistance In Dying. And it makes me wonder. Is that me in the future? Am I going to be THAT guy? The one who is in some discomfort, isn’t dying anytime soon, is relatively mentally competent (or at least as I ever was) but simply cannot endure the day to day that is misery?
I already live in fear of mental decline. For someone who has always lived in his mind, has always used his mind to separate himself apart from others in school or work, who defines himself by his mind, the thought of that mind not being “there” to continue to define myself is relatively terrifying. If my fear of snakes was put in comparison with fear of dementia, snakes would be about a 2 compared to a 12 for dementia. Even while knowing that ironically, I won’t know if it does decline.
Anyway.
On the other hand, I’m not in distress, I’m not in crisis. It’s a setback, I’ll bounce back. I’ll write, I’ll do Lego, I’ll do some stuff on my website design. But first I’m going to take a mental health day on Wednesday, as I didn’t feel like I’d really accomplish anything at work anyway.
Oh, and I’ll take out the garbage and recycling. I’ve already cleared snow twice today (Tuesday) so I’m hoping I won’t need to do that on Wednesday too, if I can help it. More coming on Thursday. Yay.
At least I was outside for awhile, right?
In the meantime, I blog late at night, throwing my words out into the abyss. A week ago I reached 1500 posts, and I didn’t even notice. I probably need to celebrate that milestone somehow, just not sure what it is yet.
Blogging is a strange world at times. Particularly for a personal site, where I try to embrace my inner muse and reveal what I’m thinking. Transparency is a regular mantra for me, with work, with personal relationships, with myself. And yet, when I’m feeling blah, I tend not to post about it because, well, I’m feeling blah about posting too.
This week I’m feeling a bit run down mentally, physically and emotionally. My leg has been giving me grief over the last few weeks, ever since it got infected. And while the infection seems to be gone, the resulting leg ulcer (if that’s the right term) remains. I am now officially part of “wound care”. But it’s not like I had surgery or was stabbed by a supervillain. I literally scraped my shin on a laundry basket and 4m later, the damn thing hasn’t healed properly.
Some of that is my weight, some is pre-diabetes (with the two obviously linked), and some is just the spot on my leg that I keep hitting it so it takes longer to heal as I age. Adding to the problem is that I have swelling in my legs. It seems to be venous, i.e, my veins are not doing an adequate job of pumping my blood back into my body. Weak calf muscles, I guess.
But the wound itself, and needing “wound care” is only a third of the problem. In and of itself, the need for wound care because it was gross and infected was basically that I didn’t take good enough care of the wound. I should have kept it covered better, washed and cleaned it better, put more anti-bacterial cream and stuff on it. And taken more care to avoid whacking it yet again. So that’s a small nudge to my self-esteem. I have no one to blame but myself and my own laziness. Stupid me, stupid leg, as I blogged previously.
However, on top of that, I had a problem last Friday. The previous three bandages I had on it were with a silver nitrate layer that helps sterilize the area and kill the infection. On Friday, they put on a new layer of stuff, and I didn’t really ask too many questions. I just thought it was a different layer of bandage. I was distracted by something else going on, but I’ll come to that in a minute. The short version is that the new bandage thing wasn’t likely to be a problem so I didn’t expect anything with it. However, as I posted on FB, it was an iodine layer designed to do the same as the silver layer had, except I tolerated the silver just fine. The iodine? Not so much.
It went on around 1:30 p.m., and by 6:00 p.m. I was going crazy. I took off a compression bandage that I thought was causing the problem and it lessened the issue for awhile. By 8:30, I was jumpy again. By 10:00 p.m., I would have considered amputation. That is not an exaggeration. I was considering a visit to the emergency room. What had started as a simple occasional twinge was up to 60 seconds of pain, 90 seconds of release and then another 60 seconds of pain again. Not like level 10 or anything, just a strong 6 or so. But it was constant and I couldn’t relieve it. I needed a solution, and I had no idea what the problem was. Finally I had to look at the wound, so I removed the bandage to find this brown “goop” that I no idea what it was (turns out it was the iodine patch). It didn’t look “normal” so I washed it off, took 2 advil and a sleep EZE pill, elevated the leg and tried to sleep. It was a bit more complicated than that, trying to wash it off while in a lot of pain and having NO idea what was going on with the wound, but we got it sorted out, and I slept. I kicked Andrea to the guest room because I thought the night would be hellish, but as it turned out, it wasn’t bad. I managed to sleep.
The next morning, I called the wound care clinic, and went in to see them after lunch. We decided it was the iodine patch as the pain went away afterwards, and so in hindsight, what I was feeling was essentially the equivalent of iodine being applied directly to the open wound every 60-90 seconds. It wound normally sting anyway, but after 8h of it, I couldn’t take anymore. If I was at a hospital, I would have been begging for a TENS unit (spelling? the thing they use instead of epidurals to disrupt the pain signals), some painkillers, or amputation. I had no idea what the cause was, I just needed it to stop.
Not my finest hour, dealing with the constant pain, and it’s left a residual taste in my mouth of self-disgust. Both in handling it as well as the original cause.
But what’s making me blah is that part of the challenge with the healing is that my lower legs are swollen. Weight, venous issues, pre-diabetes, take your pick, but I have excess fluid in my lower legs. There’s a simple solution of course, compression socks. I’ve used them before, it worked well, but it was never a huge problem and more out of inconvenience than anything, I stopped using them.
Well, now I basically need it again. And the part that is kicking my brain is that I will, in all likelihood, need them for life.
So if it gets warm in the summer, and I don’t wear them, my leg ulcer is likely to return as the leg swells. And I’ll end up back in wound care. Plus, if you don’t wear them for a while and your legs re-swell, the socks won’t easily fit and I’ll have to get separate wrapping to do it.
Maybe I’ll be able to lose some weight and I won’t need them; maybe I’ll be able to strengthen calf muscles. Maybe a genie will appear from a magic lamp and give me three wishes. Maybe things will improve, maybe they won’t. I can do a 1000 things to improve my life for other things, and it may make no difference for venous insufficiency, the current cause of my problem.
So.
Compression socks.
For life.
In the summer, when I’d like to wear shorts, etc. and not look or feel like an old man. I already have enough self-esteem issues that I feel uncomfortable wearing shorts lots of times, tend to prefer baggy sweat pants or regular pants, but comfort is also important, right? Apparently if I want to go swimming, I *can* take them off to do that, but afterwards, they should go on right away.
Or if I get careless for a few days, the legs will reswell and I’ll have to reset everything with separate wrapping to get the leg down to normal size so I can wear the custom socks.
Is it a big deal? Not really. Jacob deals with worse on a daily basis with his AFOs, and he has adjusted just fine. All I have to wear are simple socks, no major surgery required or anything, and yet it’s knocking my mental health back.
Some part of my reaction is simply mortality, one step closer to the great dirt nap. Some of it is simple ageing. Some of it is the embarrassment that I’ve declined to a point from which I can only partially recover. Some of it is February blah. Some of it is the pandemic isolation effect. Some of it is just me wallowing.
But much of it is just trying to wrap my head around the uncertainty of the future, what it will be like trying to go places where it will be warm and hot, where I’ll have to wear compression socks that I won’t be mature enough to want other people to know, and so I’ll likely have to wear pants instead of shorts. And, according to the nurse (who is admittedly a bit hard-core), likely for life.
For those who have read my blog before, you know that I’m relatively transparent about things in my life that are about me. I might hedge on stories that intersect with Andrea or Jacob, particularly where some things are not my story to tell, but on my side of life, I’m fairly open. I feel at times that it is part of my zeitgeist with respect to the blog. There’s no point having a blog of my experiences if I am sugar-coating part of it, or turning it into a “sunshine and rainbows”-type social media feed, where you only post photos and updates that reflect well on you.
So over the last couple of years, I’ve talked about my weight, some heart stuff, tests here and there, etc. But one thing I haven’t talked about, mostly as it wasn’t that significant, was a problem I have with my legs. Like many overweight and/or diabetic/pre-diabetic people, I can get swelling in my ankles and shins, extra pooling of water, and normally you can “dispel” the water by wearing compression socks. Exciting, sexy, squeeze the water out of your shins, stockings.
I have a couple of pair, and if/when things get bad with my legs, I can wear them for a few days or weeks, and things return to some semblance of normal. It’s not super comfortable, but it gets the job done.
But I also have a specific spot on my right shin that I bang regularly. I’ve banged it for years, all the way back to being a kid, and while lots of people have scars on their knees, I have a bunch where I scraped my shins. It’s a little bit gross, I admit, but when my legs swell, the scars tend to fill with a bit of water. Once in a while, I’ll break the tissue layer on something, the water will run out, it leaks for a day or two, it heals, it goes back to normal. Annoying, but not exactly serious.
Then about 3 months ago, I rapped my shin a good one. I seem to recall it being something simple like a laundry basket of clean clothes sitting near my bed. I walk from the bathroom to the bed in the dark, and if I forget that I put the basket there, I can easily catch the side of it on my shin as I pass by. I do, and I did, except this time? It took a very large chunk out of a big area, and it has taken a long time to heal. It bled initially, I didn’t even notice at the time other than it was stinging, and I ended up washing it all off in the morning. It leaked, no biggie. Except, as I said, it hasn’t healed.
Now, lots of older people in their 80s and 90s get these types of skin breaks that take time to heal, but young guys like me (as the nurse said earlier today hahaha) should heal faster. In the meantime, I was in a cycle of it being irritated, drying out, showering, getting irritated, drying out, etc. A few months ago, it was annoying me, and I put some anti-bacterial cream on it for a day or two with some bandages, kept it covered, seemed fine.
Until last weekend.
Last Saturday / Sunday, it started to get sore. And a few times this week it really suddenly “pinged”, like a sharp pain almost like someone stuck me with a pin. It was sore to the touch, started being redder, but then it would fade, all good for a bit. More worrisome, but not alarming. Until last night. What had been simply red and irritated suddenly looked all yellow, gooey, and gross, like it was infected. Plus it hurt like the Dickens (the devil, not the writer).
So I snapped a pic, asked Andrea to be equally grossed out and validate my concern that I was a gross, overweight slob who was probably now infected too, and reached out this morning to my normal doctor’s office to see if I could get an appointment.
Now, I need to step back a moment. My doctor is part of a larger “teaching clinic” so there is the supervising physician and several resident interns usually, and they are housed within a long-term care hospital, so the rules for visiting are a bit strict. I tried to have my eye looked at in the fall, when I had pink-eye which negates going pretty much anywhere, and didn’t get very far. I ended up just doing AppleTree who did tele-medicine for me. Honestly, most of the time it is easier to get into AppleTree after a couple of hours of waiting rather than my clinic’s several days to get in. One nice part for the main clinic was that it was close to work, so if I was going for a regular appointment, I could pop out and back during the day. Now? Not so convenient.
But the magic words are “I think it might be infected” and they managed after much juggling and texting between triage and the clinic to find me a spot this morning at 11:30. It was a crapfest of a day for my schedule at work, but 11:30 it was.
Off I go, they even had room in the parking lot for a change, pass through screening level 1 and then 2, and then arrive in the empty waiting room. As an aside, the screening person told me I could put a new mask (PPE-style) on over top of my existing mask, which seemed odd, but okay. Then as soon as I arrived in the clinic, one of the doctors immediately told me I had to take my regular mask off and just wear the PPE. Okay, I live to serve. Just tell me the correct rules, I’ll follow them! You’re the ones on the front line, I’ll do what you tell me.
Appointment was relatively fine. Sure, I know the horror stories out there. People whose infections don’t get under control, spread up the leg, cause lots of pain, huge risk of sepsis and even death, although far more likely to lose the leg than anything, if things go south. Or north as the case may be.
Anyway, mostly I was just pissed at myself. The reason I’m having this problem is that I haven’t taken advantage of the last 9m at home to really turn some health corners. I’ve held my ground, and made a bit of progress, but there are bigger gains on the horizon once I get there. This however is one of the types of complications that comes from NOT solving the problem earlier. 100% preventable. And if it expands, there’s only me to blame.
Fortunately, the infection hasn’t spread, it’s still local and not too extreme from the looks of it. Anti-biotics and some clean dressings should have me right as rain in a couple of weeks, hopefully. They are worried about the excess fluid in the legs, so I’ll have to revisit compression stockings, and they have custom ones that fit better apparently, which sounds oh, so wonderful.
I think the doctor thought I was over-reacting a bit until I showed him the photo from last night. He didn’t even think it was the same wound at first as I’ve cleaned it up and taken a shower this morning to clean it all out. I got high marks for wound care, at least.
I also took advantage of my visit to revisit my gaping hole in blood work to make sure my blood pressure and diabetes-related meds are working, and he was not as impressed that it has been so long since my last test. I was due last spring, just before the world collapsed, so he wants that done asap, and some other referrals related to the wound care (CCAC, etc.). A few things to put in place as soon as possible, and while not necessarily critically urgent, I’m trying to tick as many boxes as I can today. The day was already a crapshow anyway.
I won’t post actual photos of the leg, it’s pretty gross looking, and I’m having a bit of a self-esteem problem already today. Hopefully I can use that as a bit of a motivation for change, but I’ll settle for a short-term motivation to get the wound healed and try out some new compression socks.
Like I said in the title: stupid leg, stupid me. But at least it’s not irreversible and relatively easily treated to start. Fingers crossed.
I mentioned in my posts about my goals for 2021 that I want to do a fair amount of work on my photo gallery (Setting goals for 2021 – Part 5: Computers, Website, Blogging, Writing, Media and Photos). But in order to do that, one of the things that is a challenge is ensuring that each gallery (say, a given month of a year) is set up consistently each and every time. That’s not a “small” step of consistency, but one that starts from the very beginning. So let’s talk about the different stages of the workflow.
Stage 1. Taking the photos
My photo gallery is made up of photos that come to me from multiple sources, and I need to be able to tell them apart for the purposes of managing. I can manipulate the filenames after the fact, but it would be easier (as my friend Matt suggested) if the filenames themselves were a bit more process-friendly. So let’s look at what those FNs would look like:
Andrea’s iPhone –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – AH
Paul’s iPhone –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – PS
Jacob’s iPhone –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – JH
DSLR –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – DSLR
Point and Shoot –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – SC (* for small camera)
Screen grab –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – SCR
Tablet –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – TAB
Now, some of those can be assigned at time of capture, while others will have to be assigned at time of file transfer. Depends on the original tool. So the workflow bifurcates after this step, but the step here is the same:
Take the picture
Stage 2. Managing the photos – Pre-processing and pre-sorting
Managing the photos is initially quite easy. I have to copy them from the device to the same folder on my PC, and I do it in four stages depending on the imaging source (copy to the hard drive, copy to the sorting folder, simple sort, and convert videos).
For Andrea’s iPhone and the Point and Shoot camera, the photos get transferred to her desktop and then copied onto a USB thumb drive.
For Jacob’s iPhone, the photos get transferred to his laptop and then copied onto a USB thumb drive.
For my iPhone, the DSLR, and the tablet, all the files are synched onto my desktop into a Synching folder.
Any files that are not already renamed properly can be renamed at this stage.
For the final step, all eight original sources are then moved into a sorting folder where I sort them by month and day or event into relevant folders. Since lots of shots are grouped together, I create a file folder structure such as:
YYYY / MM-Month (general folder as the upper level folder)
YYYY / MM-Month / DD (Event title) like “14 Kayaking at MEP’s” or “29 Birthday party”
YYYY / MM-Month / Extras as a folder for ones not being used in the gallery (often mistakes or just not meant for public, like a photo taken in a store of something I want to buy)
YYYY / MMb – Special – Special event for the month (#1) like a party, trip, etc. where a large number of photos warrant their own gallery
YYYY / MMb – Special – Special event for the month (#2) like a party, trip, etc. where a large number of photos warrant their own gallery
YYYY / MMz – Blog posts for photos that I’m going to eventually upload to the website to include in various blog posts but are generally not interesting enough on their own to include in “general photos”.
For the first level of sorting, I move everything into the relevant folders. It may mean, for example, that I have a folder for a big trip that has photos from multiple sources in it, and in fact, I usually do have at least 2 sources for various daily events.
For the second level of sorting, I convert all MOV format videos into MP4 format (suitable for the web) and move all old videos into the EXTRAs sub-folder.
Copy from the device to the hard drive
Copy from hard drive (potentially via USB flash drive) to the sorting folder and rename any if necessary.
Do a simple sort by event and dates
Convert videos to MP4
Stage 3. Managing the photos – Advanced sort in Mylio
I use Mylio as my image manager, and I do four steps in Mylio.
First and foremost, I import all the images from the sorting folder including the directories I created. When they arrive in Mylio, they are in a sorting folder too. I basically go through and move the quality images I want to use for each event into the MONTHLY folder (such as 2021 / 01 January). Extras that I’m not using, such as the secondary or tertiary photos of a group of ducks, I move into the EXTRAS folder. I also do a quality sort on the videos, special events, and folders of photos I intend to use for my blog posts.
In some cases, I may decide to edit a video or photo to make it suitable for sharing, in which case I make a copy and edit the copy rather than the original. I usually do this in another program beyond Mylio and then reimport the edited version.
Once I have a set of photos and videos for a given month (for instance, 2021 / 01 January), I run facial recognition on the “good” photos (there are too many photos to worry about doing the Extras too) and I let the computer do most of the work to group them and guesstimate who is in the photo. After the first few hundred of a given year are posted, the rest of the guesses are usually pretty accurate on the first attempt. I then add metadata to the files. This includes a name and description for the photo (identical as it is used differently in WordPress), something short, and some keyword tagging that includes year, city, event, and any people in the photo who were tagged in the Key Words. Finally, I save all the metadata to the image file.
Finally, now that the photos are all sorted, named and tagged, I move it from a sorting folder into my full folder structure for the Panda Photo Gallery in Mylio which generally has the structure of FAMILY / YEAR / MONTH.
Import images into Mylio sorting area
Do advanced quality and photo selection, filing the rest in EXTRAS.
(Optional) Edit any photos or videos that require tweaking
Facial recognition
Add metadata (name, description, tags/keywords)
Save metadata to image file
Move from sorting folder into a full folder structure
Stage 4. Uploading to WordPress
Up until this point, most of the file management stuff is just simply a good process / workflow for keeping my photos organized and filtered for quality. Now I look at the parts of getting it on the website.
Initially, I create a page to hold the gallery (while this could be done later, it saves a step in the gallery creation process) and assign it a name such as 2021/01 January, and insert two default items — a blank photo gallery and a blank video gallery. I save the page, but leave it in edit mode.
Then, working by folder (such as 2021 / 01 January), I create a new GALLERY called 2021-01 January in WordPress. This opens an upload area, and using Mylio as my initial interface, I upload all of the good PHOTOS for that month/event. Since I already populated the metadata fields, the upload puts everything into the WordPress fields for me. This completes the step of uploading all the PHOTOs. I can then edit the GALLERY description to describe the various events in the monthly folder (copying the description for later use, like a descriptive table of contents), add the link to the page created above (the step that I saved allows me to do this now), and add the GALLERY to the appropriate ALBUM (such as the year, 2021).
Then it is time to upload Videos, if any. These have to be done in the Media Library, and using Media Library Assistant, I save them to a separate sub-folder usually called YYYY-MM. Now that all the files are uploaded, it’s time to go back and edit the page I created earlier.
Each Gallery page has six components to edit:
The Page name, if it needs to be tweaked from the standard page name (usually YYYY-MM for months but could be YYYY-MM Special – Trip to Mexico);
A manual breadcrumb that I’ve created to allow the viewer to go one level higher easily;
A description of the gallery (same as what was already entered in the Gallery Page, just pasted here);
The blank gallery block to choose which gallery I want to show, and to change the order of photos if needed;
The names / description of any videos that need to be linked; and,
Linking to the videos themselves.
Finally, everything is saved and the page is previewed to make sure everything works, and the page is published. The link is then shared to FB along with the gallery description.
Create a page and edit the page name, add a blank photo gallery block and a blank video gallery block, and save in draft mode;
Create the new gallery, upload all the photos, edit the gallery for gallery description (and copy for later) and link to the page created above;
Add the GALLERY to the right ALBUM;
Upload videos and sort into sub-folder;
Go back and edit the page for page name, manual breadcrumb, paste the description, choose a gallery in the blank gallery block, edit the names / descriptions of the videos, and link to the videos themselves;
Save and preview/test, then publish;
Share link with FB.
Stage 5. Backups and further usage
Mylio automatically does a backup of all photos to a secondary location, and long-term, I want that to upload to the cloud too. Later, I do a separate backup of all my files to off-site storage.
At the end of the year, I also take all the “GOOD” photos and put them on a USB thumb drive for Andrea to weed and use to make a Photobook. Once she’s done, I save the final photos back to another folder labelled PHOTOBOOK. If there are any really good ones for the year, we also use them in Calendars, New Year’s letters, metal prints, and an e-frame.
Backup to secondary location/vault;
Backup with all files to offsite location;
Create a small subset each year for Andrea to use for photobooks, calendars, New Year’s letter, metal prints, and e-frame;
Copy subset back to a folder called PHOTOBOOKS.
And then, finally, I’m done. Whew. So let’s look at that workflow all together so I don’t miss anything each time. I’m also going to copy it into a PowerPoint print-out so I don’t lose it. Nineteen steps that I have to do consistently every time or something gets messed up.
Take the picture
Copy from the device to the hard drive
Copy from hard drive (potentially via USB flash drive) to the sorting folder and rename any if necessary.
Do a simple sort by event and dates
Convert videos to MP4
Import images into Mylio sorting area
Do advanced quality and photo selection, filing the rest in EXTRAS.
(Optional) Edit any photos or videos that require tweaking
Facial recognition
Add metadata (name, description, tags/keywords)
Save metadata to image file
Move from sorting folder into a full folder structure
Create a page and edit the page name, add a blank photo gallery block and a blank video gallery block, and save in draft mode;
Create the new gallery, upload all the photos, edit the gallery for gallery description (and copy for later) and link to the page created above;
Add the GALLERY to the right ALBUM;
Upload videos and sort into sub-folder;
Go back and edit the page for page name, manual breadcrumb, paste the description, choose a gallery in the blank gallery block, edit the names / descriptions of the videos, and link to the videos themselves;
Save and preview/test, then publish;
Share link with FB.
Backup to secondary location/vault;
Backup with all files to offsite location;
Create a small subset each year for Andrea to use for photobooks, calendars, New Year’s letter, metal prints, and e-frame;
As you can see from the last four posts, I’m using already-established headings that work well for me to handle goal-setting for the year. Unfortunately, now I come to the mother of all categories which is basically all my hobbies on a computer in a digitally-enabled life. The list is so extensive or pervasive that it normally takes up a whole separate whiteboard for me. Let’s parse it into more manageable chunks.
Computers
It likely seems odd that the whole area is about computers, and then I make the first sub-category “computers”, but generally, I’m talking about the setup of a computer — hardware and software. This area isn’t generally big or complicated, it’s a nice manageable chunk of sorts.
First and foremost, I have to do regular backups. This includes my computer, Andrea’s computer and Jacob’s computer. Sometimes those lists are pluralized for Jacob and I, but at the moment, not so much. We generally are only using one desktop each. He has a PC upstairs but never uses it, and I migrated all the components over to his gaming laptop for files. One system, one backup. Andrea has only ever had one, so no issues there. For me, I have usually had a second device, a laptop for streaming, and I’m not running that currently, so it is just my main PC. I am a bit out of date since my last backup, so time to do another. My main fear of things missing from the last backup are photos and ensuring proper storage, a recurring, nagging worry, even once backed up. What if there’s a fire? I want all the photos on off-site cloud storage, but not quite there yet.
Second, I also need to do some basic security upgrades to various devices, including Andrea’s and tweaking of Jacob’s. I’d also like us all to use the same password manager, if possible.
Third, I mentioned I don’t have a streaming PC setup downstairs, and I want to fix that situation to a more powerful setup than my basic laptop. I have an extra old PC, easy enough to upgrade and tweak to make suitable for the need. Equally, I have a few extra monitors I need to configure.
Finally, my desktop PC needs a tweak to the setup for both potentially an extra monitor (which I’m resisting) and a better webcam/microphone setup (that I really need for trivia hosting).
Website
In the same way that I feel odd having a whole section about computers with a subheading for computers again, I have this one for the website when the next few are also about my website. But, as with computers, this is more about the setup while the others are more about content.
For my website, I launched my design for PolyWogg 5.0 this past year, and overall, I’m pretty happy with it. It includes all new Featured Images, restructured layouts for consistency, and everything is in one place. But in the same way that a strength can also be a weakness, the co-location of both PolyWogg (personal) and PolyBlog (writing) content and a single theme for all of it does create some branding challenges.
For example, when I create the layout for my site, I can do pages or posts as my default content. When it is a one-off blog topic, my musings so to speak, it’s a post. If it is more part of some more static content that I’m building, they are pages. But each page, normally, has the same header image and menu as the rest of the site. I like my theme, I’m not looking to change that, it works really well for me, but as I do more writing and building of content in a few areas, the default images and menus are not always the best combo for a page that could have a different message/branding than the default.
My basic menu structure would benefit from four separate options at the present time. For general blogging, I can do my Main Menu easy enough. It’s the one that I have been doing all along — my default menu. But if I look at a second area, my photo gallery, right now it is a single vertical menu item in the horizontal menu with lots of nested pages. It makes the main menu a bit big and unwieldy (plus slows down load time a bit). So, if instead, I had a site that was JUST my photo gallery, I would change the header image of course but I would also make those vertical menu structures more horizontal, spreading the years out differently. Maybe grouped in five year chunks, maybe current year would be separate. For my PolyWogg Guides that I’ll be doing more of in the future, I already am not entirely happy with the menu structure for the HR guide and want a better one for the new Astronomy guide. As I write more in the future, that problem will exacerbate the pressure on the menu structure. And it wouldn’t hurt to have totally different branding for the header. Finally, I have been wanting to get my trivia game going, and that is a totally different look and feel than the rest of the site. I say “finally” but I could group all my reviews together too, or a site for quotes, or a site for humour. Lots of “options” where the overhead wouldn’t be worth the separation, but for the four areas that I have already identified for growth? Absolutely there might be a worthwhile investment to be made in another structure.
So I could reconsider my decision to co-locate them, separate them into multiple sub-sites or run WordPress as a multi-site option, including merging my brother’s site that I host as well as Astropontiac. But the truth is that I really don’t want separate sites though, I want it all together. And my theme is designed to allow that, sort of at least. But when I tried it previously, it was a crapfest. Nothing I did seemed to work the way it was supposed to work.
In theory, I can create four different header images (done) and four different menus (done), and go into a page say for my PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy, tell it to replace the main header image with the Guides image and the main menu with the Guides menu, and voila, I should have a separate branding option like a sub-theme within my site. Except, as I said, when I did it all previously, it didn’t do it. The header didn’t change, the menu didn’t change. Same old, same old.
So I went on the support site for the theme, typed in what I had tried previously both within the existing theme and using other plugins, and asked, “Is there a combo of a good plugin with this theme that will do what I want?”. I pressed submit, aaaaand I broke their support site. Not completely but it somehow corrupted my account with them. Nice. While they were trying to fix that so I could ask my question, I went back to playing with my theme options, doing exactly what I tried six months ago and twelve months ago and even eighteen months ago, same general settings, and BAM! This time it worked. Son of a fudgsicle.
Which means I CAN do it. I can have separate branding for any of the pages I want. Not for posts, that’s a more complicated structure that doesn’t quite make sense with what I’m doing, but pages? No problem. Yay!
Or is it a yay? I had already accepted that it couldn’t be done in my site, I was really just doing due diligence, and considering moving my blog back to ThePolyBlog.ca, and leaving just my PolyWogg guides at PolyWogg.ca. Now I don’t have to do any of THAT change, but the other changes? They’re relatively easy enough, and in fact, I’ve already created the prototype headers and basic menus. I just have to tell those pages which header and menu to display when those pages are shown, as well as include an option to get back to the main menu. I like it, I just haven’t completely wrapped my head around it. It’s a significant change to my branding, so I want to be sure that it is the way I want to go before I do it. I think so, but I need to test a few things first.
But assuming it all tests out, I now have three significant sub-designs to figure out:
Main menu (done)
The Panda Family Photo Gallery
PolyWogg Guides to…
PolyWogg Trivia
When I get that done, it will definitely warrant a PolyWogg 6.0 classification.
In addition to all that structural work, I also want to tweak my backup settings, chron setup, and optimization settings with caching. I’m not obsessed about SEO or speedtests, but I’ll do the basics. Really what I want to do though is to uninstall Piwigo sometime soon, my “alternate” gallery setup, but I’m not ready for that big step yet.
Blogging
I call this section blogging, but it goes way beyond simple blogging. Many bloggers have a goal which is to “blog regularly”, basically to deliver regular new content. That’s not my goal. I blog when I have something to say, not say something just to meet a word count. And I have lots to say. I have itches to scratch for:
Book reviews: I have almost 200 on the site, but I need to update some links so they all show in the index page, and add some reviews from the last six months that I haven’t written yet;
Movie reviews: I have about 5-6 six on the site, another 100 or so written but not uploaded yet, and another 10-15 that aren’t even written yet.
TV reviews: I have 10-12 seasons of various shows reviewed and on the site, and probably about another 500 I could do as I’ve already reviewed the individual episodes. It’s just a time issue, and relative priority. I like writing them, but they take time away from more pressing issues in life. More just a “nice to have” at some point.
I have a big giant gaping hole in my plan for recipes. I know generally what I want for them, have a decent layout, can do them generally like my reviews for structure and internal web admin. But I don’t have a great workflow for including pictures of recipes or even getting the recipes up on the site fast enough after we make the dish and decide it’s a “keeper”, so by the time I get around to writing it up, I’ve forgotten which photos go with which recipe, or even WHEN we did it. I have photos of dishes from last February and I have no idea what they are. In an ideal world, I would have taken a picture with it of the recipe title so I’ll remember in future, but I didn’t. Was that the chicken with pasta dish and an unique sauce or was it the special noodle dish with Asian seasoning? Was it one we liked or we thought was only so-so? Eleven months later, I don’t remember. And after mentioning above about branding, I need to decide if I even want this as a blog post with everything else, or I want to make it into a page that I could style like a separate subsite for different types of recipes. Or is it both? A page for the recipe, a blog for the experience of cooking it for the first time? I haven’t figured that out, but I need to at some point. For now, it is just a general “Figure out the plan for recipes”.
I have another sub-area that isn’t quite figured out either: music reviews. Unlike the book / TV / movie reviews, the music reviews have a natural structure to them. For example, if I review the year 1943 (as I already have), should that be on a separate sub-site? Should I have separate pages for discography reviews too, such as all the albums by Elton John? I know I’m going to do the yearly reviews, but beyond that? Are they posts? Is it another PolyWogg Guide? Or is it a PolyWogg Guide of enough uniqueness that it should be a separate site on its own? And if it is, should HR and Astronomy be separated too? Enquiring minds want to know! And it would be far better to decide NOW before I get too far in the initial structure. I just need to decide.
Once I get past various forms of reviews, I have a bunch of other topics itching for me to write about them. Lots of them are one-offs, and I have a folder called Bloggable in my Gmail where I’ve saved articles, etc. Things that excited me. Like the Drake equation for predicting the likelihood of finding sentient life in the universe. Or a comparison of prices at grocery stores. Certainly I have a long list of topics as preparations for retirement. I started to write a series of posts about “Who do I owe in my life“, and I want to get back to that, as well as a series of posts about “What I learned in school” for various academic outings.
I also am way behind in some other topics I started and would like to get back to at some point. My spiritual journey and 12 questions, Being Jacob’s Dad, even a bunch related to photos like different day activities on our honeymoon. Plus finalizing a draft I did of a version of “grace” to say for dinners that is a bit non-denominational.
Writing
The main focus of my writing is usually my HR guide and the need to finish the damn thing. That remains true, of course, but I also mentioned above that I want to play with how it is laid out on the website. Maybe just a stalling tactic, with the perfect being the enemy of good enough.
Early in 2020, I started posting some of my personal writing, including the start of a story about a detective I have in mind for a series of stories. It was a prototype of a series of novels, and while I like the basic structure, I find myself throwing in too much backstory that I intended for prequel novels. It’s a bit of a rookie challenge, more experienced writers know not to do it and only throw it just enough to whet the appetite while letting the reader fill in the blanks. But I realized that in my mind, those are full-fledged stories. And quite frankly, it would be easier to tell them in sequence. So, I’m going to go back and redirect my story to start where it should have began. With the main character in law school. I have several other stories to consider in there too for the same character, and some with his friends. The big ones will likely have to wait until retirement, but I might be able to start working on the first novel this year.
In addition to that “detective universe”, I have an idea for a sci-fi novel, with a bit of an Expanse feeling to it, maybe a bit like Artemis. And I am years away from feeling ready to start my ultimate series combining mythology, Gods, challenges, and quests. But it’s on my list and I could start some of the research, plotting and outlining.
Media
I don’t know what to call this category, honestly. It’s a mish-mash of things. Up first is simply media watching, with Jacob and I working our way through the Marvel Universe, Star Wars (with Andrea), and Lord of the Rings, plus a number of other series as we come to them. Just passive stuff.
More active though is getting our music streaming everywhere in the house for iTunes and/or Amazon Prime. Some of that starts with managing my music collection on my PC and doing uploads, but the goal is streaming everywhere.
And finally there is some organization and purging to be done for VHS tapes, DVDs, and CDs.
Photos
Remember back at the beginning that I said the list could be overwhelming? Well part of that was easily just all the website redesign stuff I want to do. And that by itself is daunting. But the over-the-top, drive me crazy and call me anal, item is the photo gallery on my website.
So, the explanation of what I want to do is simple. I want to upload all my photos and videos to my website as a gallery so that I can share them with friends. I don’t want to put it on Facebook, I don’t want the videos on YouTube, I don’t want to pay for SmugMug or Flickr. I want to use my OWN site. In WordPress, not Piwigo.
In theory, that’s not a lot to ask. I have the website, check. I have WordPress, check. I have a site that will let me display photos and videos, and enough space to save them, check. I have the know-how to get them up, check. So what’s the problem? The workflow is detailed and extensive, and if I want them to be consistent across the gallery, I pretty much have to do the same workflow each time properly. Except that a few things have changed since I first started, leaving inconsistencies that I probably could live with, but I don’t want to do all this work to not have it the way I want.
So the first overall step is to develop a single, universal workflow that gets me the first gallery up and running exactly as I want it to be setup. Then I just need to replicate it for an additional ~240 galleries spread across 16 years of pictures.
The tracker for the galleries and sub-galleries is long and detailed. And as I have done a few serious tests and prototypes, just before WordPress changed the way it handles certain media types, I now know that the 240 galleries may in fact grow to be about 400 galleries to make some things way easier to manage. Which means that the first thing I have to do is fully confirm the workflow for each gallery from start to finish. Some of the galleries are already up and running in the site, but I’ll need to tweak them a bit to the new layout and functions. I’m close to the final gallery layout, I just need to ensure a couple of functions work the way they are supposed to in 2-3 different configurations. But the workflow needs to be tweaked on the front end for filenaming for photos from Andrea and from Jacob, as well as scanning sources and/or importing into Mylio, plus for the back end for storage and creation of things like PhotoBooks.
The other thing I need to do is finalize the tracker for “all” the types of galleries. This includes:
standard PandA Family monthly galleries;
special galleries for trips, etc.;
monthly galleries of extra photos for blogs, recipes, etc;
an option for PolySpring sharing of photos;
special content galleries for products like reviews, PolyWogg Guides or PS Transitions; and,
a special layout and tagging option for Astro photos.
If I put the whole workflow and tracker on the whiteboard at once, it takes up a whole whiteboard. For the next round, I think I’ll just put up the area for the workflow and an area for a couple of galleries that I’m working on at any one time. My separate e-tracker can maintain the ongoing tracking.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Better webcam/microphone setup
Web: Branding: Main
Web: Branding: Photo gallery
Photos: Workflow with sub-options for monthlies, specials, blogging, reviews and special products
Photos: Workflow and basic tracker to whiteboard
Photos: Full tracker in e-form.
This is an area that is important to me and I spend a lot of time on it as a result trying to get it where I want it to be. It might be anal but it is part of my choices. I choose to do this work, I choose to share the photos and videos as part of my sense of identity.
And that completes my to do list update for 2021. Now I just need to triage January’s list as I can’t possibly do them all, alas.
