Thanks to our handy-dandy digital camera, I was able to take photos throughout my Hawaii trip. A little snap here, a little snap there, over forty photos taken in a total of about ten minutes. I have spent the last forty-five minutes, however, trying to figure out how to get the darned things out of the camera and into my laptop. Add that to the half hour or so spent downloading the software, and you get a lot of time and, for me at least, frustration getting this admittedly helpful technology to work!
In general, I think that technology is a great asset to daily life. I love my washing machine, for example. My life would be very different indeed if I had to handwash everything and stuff it through some contraption to wring out the excess water and then wait (forever if I lived in Seattle) for the clothes to dry. Aside from the obvious advantages, a great plus to my machine is that even though I have not read the owner's manual in its entirety...I am able to use it without difficulty.
What I do not like about technology is that some new things take so long to learn that I begin to wonder where the advantage lies. If, for example, I don't own a phone that text messages, and therefore do not miss this service at all, and it would take me forever and a day to figure out how to do it (including learning the abreviations that seem to have sprung up from texting) then why should I bother spending the time and energy to do it? Is text messaging essential to the comings and goings of my life? Will learning how to do it make my communications any easier? Heck, does anyone I know text message or would I be the only one of my friends with a phone that even has the capability?
Occasionally Rob and I get the feeling that technology is ganging up on us and passing us by. At what point do we become like the baby boomers (not all of them, but some, for sure) who can't figure out how to use an answering machine and who insist that even though you can't rent VHS tapes anymore, their "video machine" suits them just fine. When will there be so many advances that we can no longer catch up with them all? We look around us and see younger folks doing things with various forms of gadgetry and realize that we have no idea what they're up to. Are we out of touch? If so, does it really matter?
Okay, on to more pressing issues, such as the status of my HI knitting projects. As predicted, I did not get around to balling up the yarn for Anouk, so instead I took about eight balls of yarn and started work on a sweater. It's knit in the round from the hem up, which makes me a bit nervous because of the hourglass shape. If it doesn't fit my hourglass shape, I'm doomed. I'll either have to figure out a way to fix it or frog all the way down miles and miles of stockinette stitch. Here it is so far:
I am very sorry to say that it has taken me the better part of an hour to get this picture posted. Our camera (and its software) is about six years old, so it is not very user-friendly. I had to compress the file in order to get it into the post, but now the image quality is poor. I think that if you want a better look, you can click on the photo and see it in a separate window. BTW, those burly man hands are Rob's, not mine. I'm the one taking the photo. :-)
I also worked on the razor shell scarf, but not a lot. So far I have about a foot and a half of it done. Yup. It's one of "those" projects - it goes on and on and on and on and....
Okay, I'm done. Time for bed and a technology-free sleep.
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