Walking to work this morning, tightly bundled up in my coat, scarf and toque, I thought to myself... it's not that cold outside. I can put up with a winter like this, it's only temporary after all. But that made me think even more... How often does the state of temporary turn into something more permanent? I currently work in a job that I don't mind most of the time, but also a job that I usually don't see myself doing in the next 10 years. When I got my job I was excited about the prospect of having a job, having that regular pay cheque that would pay for my rent and all the other bits and bobs that I could come up with to spend my money on. This morning I really don't like this feeling of temporary. I would like to feel more attachment to what I'm doing. I spend my days at work telling people to look for work that is meaningful for them, but at the same time balance out their other responsibilities. It pains me to have to say that we would all like to work in jobs that were personally rewarding, but sometimes it's just not possible in the short term. I always encourage people to apply for positions that could be considered their dream job, although not everyone knows what that type of job would be. I know what I want to do though... and it certainly isn't what I spend my days doing. It's interesting that I work in a position where I am employed to help other people find employment. To some degree I work with people to assess their skills and their career goals... I try to find realistic ways that they can pursue work that will not only allow them to survive financial but also make them happy. As I sat in a professional development session last week my mind was churning with possible business strategies and potential prospects that I could pursue with my photography. While sitting in that cold ballroom I told myself that there would be no more putting things off... photography work wasn't just going to fall into my lap. In order to get noticed I would need to take more photographs... something that I haven't been doing as much as I should.

I don't usually get to the level of frustration where I want to stomp on my computer (it's not good to blame the technology that feeds me), but tonight is one of those nights. After spending a fair amount of time in the past couple weeks laying out a beautiful photo book, I tried to upload my book so that it could be printed only to face failure each of the nearly twenty times I tried. I thought maybe it was my wireless connection... then I thought it might be my computer. No, no, no... The Apple rip off software made by My Publisher had one fatal flaw, it let you lay out lovely books, but it refused to let you buy anything from them. So only solution is to redo my photo book using another program. I'd love to be able to use iPhoto but their large hardcover options do not have a nice cutout instead only an ugly sticker. And I really wanted to do hardcover for this book.

Grrrrrrrrr... I'm more than a little upset by this whole situation. I was being so productive with my photo work, and now I feel like all the work I completed in the last couple weeks has gone to waste. Curse you My Publisher... despite your snazzy looking website you've lost a potential customer thanks to your non-user friendly upload service.