I haven't really been paying attention to the weather forecast these past few days so imagine my surprise this morning when I opened the front door to take out the recycling and was confronted with several inches of snow! Not only that, but our neighbor was already out shoveling and had shoveled our sidewalk for us! Did I mention that this was at 6am?
Anyway, I am feeling all virtuous because it's not yet 7am and already I have shoveled our porch and front path, taken out the trash and recycling, finally replaced the medicine cabinet bulbs that blew out probably a couple of months ago at this point (I bought the replacement bulbs yesterday), emptied and reloaded the dishwasher AND cooked myself some eggs for breakfast!
So, this is the amazing Valentine's gift I received. In brown. How lucky am I? How did my husband know exactly what bag to get me? Well, let's just say he received an e-mail link to this page. Ok, to be clear, it was not an unsolicited e-mail link, and the only reason I even saw this bag was because I was in the Coach store picking out a briefcase for him for his birthday last year!
I love this bag. The leather is so soft and smooth I have pretty much been petting my bag on the subway every morning. It has the right number of pockets that I like to have to organize all my stuff and I think it looks great too. I'm a sucker for messenger bags - I haven't really ever had any other kind as my going to work every day bag. You might remember (ok you probably don't as it was almost a year ago) that, after some deliberation and shopping around I bought a Namaste messenger bag (in brown). I also ended up getting The Trixy (also in brown) as a more sturdy travel bag. I used the Namaste for a while - I like the bag, but it didn't quite work as my every day bag. It was a little too floppy I think. I ended up switching and using The Trixy, even though I prefer to have a bag with a longer strap that I can carry messenger style. The tote style strap worked fine in the summer but in the winter, with more bulky clothing, it's a bit more awkward.
All this to say that I am really happy with my new bag. It makes me happy in a way that I've heard people get about shoes. My laptop doesn't fit in it but that's ok, I still have The Trixy for travel.
Of course, yesterday was a rare occasion when I had to bring my laptop into work so I had to sadly switch bags. My laptop is another gift from my husband that I love. Although shhhh, don't tell it, but I did go to the Apple store to check out the new MacBook Air and WOW!!!!! It's amazing to see the photos but it's even more amazing to see it in person. It really is that thin. Think about how much more space we're all eventually going to have in our bags at the airport!!!
The reason I had to bring my laptop to work is kind of silly but I've been working on a slideshow of images from throughout this project I've been working on for the past three years for the project team open house next week. And on my PC at work, with limited time, I could not figure out a good way to organize photos into the order that I wanted. Our mac-based graphics team recommended Kodak EasyShare but I think they must have heard of it and not used it because it SUCKED!!! At least, it sucked for someone with limited time who is used to using iPhoto. iPhoto is like iTunes - you have a library of images and your albums references those images. If you delete a photo from an album, it's still in your library. You can put the same photo in many different albums without making duplicate copies of it. EasyShare did not work that way. It's a different way of thinking but I could have worked around that. The biggest problem however was that you could not export the photos from an album into a folder with the files renamed sequentially based on the order you had arranged them in. Again, I had limited time, but I just couldn't figure out how to make it do what I needed.
I didn't have time to fuss around trying other software (eg Picasa) and I knew I could get it done quickly on my laptop so that's what I did. And here's another reason why I love my laptop. Turns out I also have iDVD - now I know how to make DVDs!!! And it only took me 45 minutes to create a fast and slow version of my slideshow, including learning time. And it was much less frustrating than, say, trying to work with EasyShare and some other DVD creating software I downloaded that could have worked only it had a limit of 99 images... oh yeah, this was it and granted, the image limit was probably because I only downloaded a free trial version but still! PC software is generally so ugly and dumb!!!! And yes, I grew up on a mac and have spent more time on macs so I'm more comfortable on a mac but I think there are lots of reasons why!
Unfortunately the story doesn't have an entirely happy ending because the windows media player version of the slideshow my coworker made as a back-up ended up looking better on the client's projection system than the DVD did, which is really odd to me (and possibly not the fault of iDVD - I'll have to see it myself when I'm there on Monday), and the software wasn't perfect (for example, in iDVD you can't set the time per image to 2 secs, only 1 sec or 3 secs - you have to create the slideshow in iPhoto and export it to iDVD as a movie) but still, I was pretty impressed with it. Plus it was fun. Due to my software struggles, most of the process was not - if the whole thing had been done in iPhoto to begin with, including all of our photo archiving, it would have been so much better.
I think it's amazing what we can do ourselves now and I'm sorry but I think this is yet another area where Apple excels. Not everyone can afford professional software but the iLife bundle comes standard on, I think, all macs now and also has an affordable purchase price. You can do a lot with this software. You can organize photos and make books, calendars, cards, slideshows with them (and with a small plug-in, also upload direct to flickr). You can also make movies, DVDs, websites, and music. Now I'm thinking that not only do I have to make a physical wedding album but I also need to make a wedding DVD...!
So, in summary: yay neighbor! Yay bag! Yay Apple!