I’ve been driven back into the arms of this journal to vent about my own shortcomings, specifically my failure to take a picture yesterday for my photo a day group on Flickr. This morning at 6 o’clock, when I realized I’d missed a day, my first thought was “well, I might as well quit since I’ve messed it up; better luck next leap year”. (I’ve successfully completed a photo a day project before, but never in a leap year, which is one reason I decided to do one in 2012.) I was so mad at myself! I had all day to take a picture, any picture; my camera and/or my phone are usually within easy reach so I just needed to pick one up, point the lens at something, and click the button. Easy peasy. I even remembered I needed to take a photo, but I remembered when I was busy with something else so put it off and it didn’t occur to me again until this morning when it was too late. I know this is such a very minor thing that I shouldn’t have gotten so agitated, but I did. I fumed. I berated myself. I thought about cheating and backdating a photo. (I was not proud of that thought, for sure, which led to a new round of scolding myself.) I went downstairs and took 22 photos so I’d at least have something for today if I decided to try and salvage the project. I took another couple at the gas station when I stopped on the way to work. I was determined to have a photo for today, no question. It might turn out to be an ugly photo, a stupid photo, a crappy snapshot, but I was not going to fail two days in a row. I think I’d pretty much decided at that point to continue with the project despite no longer being able to complete it as I’d once hoped, though I didn’t admit that to myself until much later today. So I won’t have a photo to represent each day of 2012. Stuff happens. I can still have photos for the other 365 days, and the one I took today of something I did yesterday to stand in for the photo I missed. One of the reasons I decided to do the project this year was to document my everyday life, and reaching that goal that doesn’t depend on getting it perfect. Why couldn’t I have reached that reasonable conclusion this morning? My brain feels so wonky sometimes.

Now that I am clear on continuing, I need to catch up with posting my photos to Flickr. I got stalled mid-month, when I left town to spend a few days in Indianapolis for the Purple Systems user conference. At least I took a lot of photos during that, mostly of the architecture.