Going into unemployment retirement from my job, I put together a list of activities that I wanted to retire to. That consisted of (1) Tabby's Place (a) socializing cats, (b) taking pictures of them, and (c) writing about the Kitten Fund; (2) reading Le Monde and other French print, along with some audio; (3) beginning online drumming lessons through Musora/Drumeo.
Of those 3 activities, what would I rather do? I believe the order is (1a), (1b), (1c), (3), and (2).
When I have a card of fresh photos, I would rather download them and start the process than anything else. Download them, tag them (name, suite, color(s), Tabby's Place), move them from the Camera Download folder in Dropbox to the applicable year and month folder. Use SyncBack to make a backup copy. The uploading program, whether Dropbox, ACDSee, or FastStone, will change the name of the file from the card to the usual YY-MM-DD HH.MM.SS format.
When they are all tagged and filed, I would rather go through the images and decide which to keep and which to pitch. It's not as fun as baking chocolate chip cookies, but I would rather do that and then do the basic editing (straighten, crop, white balance, color EQ, touchup) than baking or any other experience I enjoy. In a way, I'm not satisfied until the whole process is finished, in a way I'm anxious that somehow all those photos will go away forever if they're not backed up at once.
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When all of the above is done and I've completed the upload to Flickr, my next favorite activity is the monthly supporter letter for the Kitten Fund. Writing is only enjoyable when I feel like I have something to write about; I briefly wrote descriptions of the adoptable cats, but if I didn't know the cat, I didn't know what to say, and getting to know the cat required multiple visits. By the time I felt ready to write, I learned that the cat might have been adopted . So, I dropped that role.
When I'm responsible for a supporter letter, I always have one eye and one ear open for next from TP about the cat(s). If someone posts in Slack some images of the kitten(s) they're caring for, I make a copy of the picture and any text that could be used as a quote. I take notes when I visit, which is usually 2-3 times a month. At the end of the month, I have a large stock of material, and the only difficulty is whittling it down to 500 words and 5 pictures.
The structure is (1) Greeting (2) Health update (3) Anecdote (4) Pop culture cat reference, if needed (5) KTHXBAI. When thanking the supporter, I want to tie it to some other element of the letter, whether the health or the anecdote, and I'd like to make it like -- and this will probably be out of left field for you -- the closet gag from Fibber McGee and Molly.
They didn't always use it in an episode, but when they did, it wasn't always in the same scene each time, there wasn't a long setup, and they masked it until they wanted to spring it. Just a scene, they're talking about something relevant to the story, they want something, oh it's in the hall closet BOOM CRASH AVALANCHE TINKLE. I'm guessing that they learned that it worked better if the audience didn't see it coming from a mile away. Quick setup, so it's as much of a surprise as possible for a running gag.
I'm telling a story about what one of the kittens did, or giving information about a kitten's health, and then the next sentence explains the need for funds to pay for the medical care or the overhead so the kitten is safe and maybe even happy. Thank you for helping us do that. Quick and natural, and it doesn't stick out.
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I would rather do something drumming-related than French language-related. Reading French becomes tiring quickly, although I've learned enough vocabulary and grammar to be able to read a story and only need to look up the occasional unfamiliar word or idiom. It reminds me of the TiVo, which has a dozen or more films that have been waiting for me to commit 90-120 minutes of my remaining life to give them the attention they deserve. It reminds me of the unopened books on my bookshelf, books purchased with the best of intentions. It reminds me of the 50 videos in my YouTube watchlist. It reminds me of the dozens of bookmarks in the browser. It reminds me of the innumerable PDFs in a Dropbox folder labeled "You saved this for a reason."
If I thought of drumming in that way, I'd probably avoid it, too. But drumming is like short attention span theatre for me, like the short bursts of Twitter/Bluesky/Facebook posts. It's not that I can't concentrate, but at any given time there are things that I would rather do than others. I would rather feel like I'm doing a lot of small tasks that add up to an achievement, than to work on one big project.
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