So I tidied my desk yesterday

I had these big plans for the quarantine. The photo editing was first priority. But then getting some of the clutter under control was going to be a thing. And reading, which would help the cats meet their lap quota and maybe take off part of one of the many eternities we are going to suffer in cat hell for being such bad humans. (Hey, I can dream!)

Photo editing was harder than I thought it would be. I marked myself really hard, and still ended up with lots of 4 star images, and a few 5 star. I was thinking I needed a 3.5 star rating for those that are nice but not quite 4 star. I still have to work on the dark sky shots. They're even harder.

Dealing with tax paperwork is always really stressful, though it's been getting better in some ways. There's a bit of a system, and having an accountant to do the actual filing is probably the best money I've spent over the last couple decades. Doubly so for the corporation.

So putting together all the paper and electronic documents was a start on the desk. Yesterday was the serious excavation. I'm down to the regular working clutter as I think of it. Soon, I'll tackle the harder stuff. There's a shelf between the speakers for reference material. You know, Strunk and White and the other two Elements books. The Canadian Oxford. The QPB encyclopedia of words and phrase origins. A couple others. The problem is that I have to reach up and open the book. If I'm sitting here, I'm on the computer. I can open a browser window and type faster than I can open a book. So do I need the books?

Let's not get started on the drawers beside the desk. I've done periodic excavations of those, mainly for paperwork relating to tax stuff. Much of the older stuff now had a May date with a shredding truck, except that event got cancelled. I know the bottom drawer has the CD for a computer game that won't run on this computer, (the photo editor) or the next most recent one (the writing laptop). Neither has an optical disk reader. It won't run on the next oldest, which is the email computer. It will only run on the old Cube down in the basement, gathering dust. I used that one to play videos while on the bike trainer, and I haven't done that for some time, and may never again. Anyone want the Cube, or the bike (and trainer and other tri gear).

I digress. Back to the drawers. Every house has a junk drawer, and these are a bunch of them. Really, I need to take everything out of the drawer, and decide what needs to be kept handy, what needs to be kept but not handy but not lost, and what needs to be thrown away. I'm pretty sure at the back/bottom of one of the drawers is a bottle of isopropyl alcohol that was used for cleaning tape deck heads. We haven't had a tape deck in this house for several decades. A tape deck, for my younger readers, is a, oh heck, look it up yourself.

 More digression, sorry about that. (Not!) The alcohol is to clean the back windshield of the car. The idea is to install some stickers I got from a buddy. You know the stick figure family thingies you see on lots of cars? This is for photographers. I'll post a photo when I find the alcohol and get them installed.

Back to the drawers. I'm likely to be amazed at what I find. In previous excavations I've found pay stubs a decade or more old. Maybe I'll photo the detrius and blog about it. Once all that is done, it's time to tackle the basement. By then the snow will be flying again, I'm pretty sure.

Back to the quarantine plans. Somehow much of that didn't happen. Not much else happened. It's been a quiet time. I'm sure a graph of our internet usage would have spiked over the last several weeks. Streaming several seasons of Big Bang Theory will do that. (Just started season 8!)

One of the things I  mostly like about Youtube is streaming music. Today, for example, I woke up with the Hymn of the Red October running through my mind. No idea why. So I played that as I was starting the blog. The next thing suggested was a compilation of the songs from "Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo". No idea why.

 Here's a couple photos that got 4 stars that have not yet been blogged or seen on social media. I think. I wasn't entirely consistent with my tagging during our travels. This is part of the Kuri Bush beach, near where Linda found a trove of driftwood. This shot is at 50 mm to approximate what the human eye would have seen. I just loved that tree with that sky in the background, and played with several different focal lengths trying different compositions. This also explains why I often wore shoes on the beach.

Looking the other way, same beach.

Driftwood of the Day
The same chunk of wood with slightly different treatments.