Anhingas and Gators

Sunday, the girls and I headed off to the Everglades again.  I still need to drop the film off, but while we wait:

^(Shot with an honest-to-gawd Polaroid.)

I love the Everglades.  It’s much more of an intellectual park than Yellowstone or Grand Canyon, but it has its subtle beauty and elegance if you look closely.

While down there, I found a book at the visitor center at Anhinga Trail.  I read River of Grass many years ago and I thought it was great — a bit like a rambling conversation with a very wise granny.  So far, The Swamp has been more like Steven Pinker — readable and entertaining, but adequately researched and informative.

My introduction to the Everglades, personally, came years ago when my husband worked for an environmental engineering company and his coworkers, including Everglades expert Dr. Thomas Lodge, used to go camping there from time to time.  It’s one thing to visit such fabulous wetlands on vacation and it’s another altogether to watch a man who knew Marjorie Stonemen Douglas as a close friend (not just “that lady a school’s named after) set up his ancient tent that looked like something out of an Arabian Nights movie shot in the 60s.

Hunting Down Images

Remember the days when looking for a photo meant rumaging through albums or binders or shoeboxes or dozens of those envelopes that came back from drugstore photofinishers?  I still have those — don’t get me wrong.  I just went digital rummaging, though, and it’s weird.

You can’t search for something in the electronic world if you don’t know what it’s called or at least part of what it’s called.  By “search” of course, I mean the feature that allows the Macs and PCs to go locate your lost treasures for you.  To rummage, you must do what you did in the days of physical photos: you have to try to remember where you last saw it, what group of things it might be with, or which room it’s in.  After that, though, digital rummaging is the lazy gal’s version of the old-school hunt.  From my current laptop I can go out on the home network and click through all the folders on my external hard drives, my husband’s computer and external hard drives and my niece’s computer until I find what I’m looking for.

In the end, I found the files.  I rediscovered the rest of the photos from my 10th anniversary trip to the Keys and I’m letting the machines copy the files for me.  It still took an hour of rummaging.  I still feel drained by the experience.

I will be posting a first round of photographic prints this weekend, but first I need to do some serious file organization.  Organization experts are now suggesting that people not bother doing that.  They say search features on newer operating systems (OS) like Vista and every everything Mac has put out in more than a decade. allow a user to find files easily no matter where they are.  While this works well for documents with words.  I never need to hunt for old writing samples, last year’s lesson plans, or even recipes because I can remember a word or phrase from the document or part of the name.  With photos that might be called something ubiquitous like DCS-003492.jpg/IMG0483.jpg or something completely inaccurate (I found a whole folder of photos named KWtrip07-00*.jpg yet the photos were obviously taken in Savannah, GA), softwae just isn’t able to locate the “kind-of greenish espresso maker” yet.  So, I need to hunt down the things I think I’ll need and put them someplace I’ll be able to easily find them in the future.

Breakfast of Champions – Key West Style