19 for 2019 update: week 8

Week of 18 February
I’m enjoying doing these posts. It’s a nice way to end the week: to look back over what I’ve achieved (or haven’t), what I’ve learned and what I’ve done. And, of course, what progress I have made with my 19 for 2019 list.

It ties in nicely with my Sunday afternoon (sort of) ritual where I write up my week’s notes in my photojournal. This is connected to Thing 11 (complete my 2018 photojournal).

I want to explain this a bit more . . . What the weekly photojournal involves is a Travelers Notebook (formerly Midori Travelers Notebook) weekly dated diary, which I use to record a couple of important or interesting things that happen each day on the dated page and then I create a 4” x 8” photo collage of the week’s photos to stick onto the other page so I can see my whole week on two pages and my whole year in two small notebooks.

It’s a big move away from Project Life, which I did from 2010 to 2016, and scrapbooking, which I haven’t done for several years. Most of my Project Life albums are incomplete, with a lot of photos waiting to be sorted, printed and slotted into the page protectors, and I may never get to them. This way is simple, and so much less bulky than the massive 12″ x 12” albums that I have for scrapbooking and Project Life.

There are also blank pages in these books that I could make additional collages for, to better cover events that have lots of photos (holidays, school sports days and that sort of thing) or that I could stick little pieces of memorabilia onto. I haven’t done that for any of them yet so there are a lot of photos that are sitting round unsorted, mainly from major holidays. I’m also thinking printed phonebooks might be a better way to store these photos and memories. They’re on a master list of projects I haven’t started.

So the idea with the collages is that at the end of each week, I’d look through the week’s photos, choose the ones I want to go in the journal, save them to a separate album and sit down during the week and make the collages for that week in the Pic Stitch app.

Because of the odd size, I find what works best is to make two square collages with anywhere from three to seven or eight photos in each and then put them together, slightly smaller than 4” x 4” on a 6” x 8” canvas in Photoshop and print them at that size, trim the edges and stick them in the book.

Last year I never quite got the routine mastered and ended the year with about nine months of missing photos—hence the thing on the 19 for 2019 list. (I also didn’t keep up with the writing and ended up having a marathon session on a very long and boring plane trip to catch up. As I said earlier, I now try to make time Sunday afternoons to do each week’s notes so I never get that far behind again. It’s not a big job, five, ten minutes at the most.

I initially thought I’d try and fit making the collages into spare 10-minute blocks that I had during the day but I’ve found it easier to just sit down and power through them in a batch. There’s a bit too much friction associated with sitting down and doing it in five spare minutes because I need to be in front of the computer and actually see the collection of the week’s photos so I can work out which template to put them into and how to best lay them out. That’s easier than trying to flip between apps on my phone.

This week I printed weeks 20 to week 29. I made weeks 46, 47 and 48 collages and got weeks 30-48 ready for printing. I still have last week’s printed photos to trim and stick in the journal, but the editing stage is almost over. Trimming and sticking is something I actually can do in 10-minute blocks, like when I’m waiting for water to boil or I have a few minutes before I have to leave to catch the bus.

Some good progress there.

Other things I did this week were:

• Entered book 4 of the 33 Beers journals into the spreadsheet (Thing 12)
• Currently reading book 9 (non fiction) and 10 (fiction) (Thing 5)
• Learned how to make a still frame from a video in Lightroom (Thing 19)
• I added avocado into my breakfast smoothie. Yum! And I bought some ingredients for one of the other breakfasts I want to try. (Thing 6)
• Defrosted my freezer. (Not a Thing but I just wanted to make this known. It was so much fun.)

Status for week 8
Things completed this week: 0
Things I progressed: 5 (5, 6, 11, 12, 19)
Things in progress I didn’t progress: 3 (1, 2, 16)
Things not started: 7 (3, 4, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18)
Things completed: 4

• Thing 9 (9 January)
• Thing 8 (21 January)
• Thing 15 (1 February)
• Thing 7 (12 February)