Suddenly, That 14 Hours Doesn't Seem All That Long ..

I leave for Australia this coming Tuesday for 3 weeks. Hopefully my plants and the dog won't die...

So ... for as much as Gary loves Brisbane, there is one teensy weensy (read *huge*) problem: it does not have an Amazon.com - weird (most countries have their own site or access to some countries site ... not Australia) . To try to buy something online, people say there are various web sites for items, but you need to know, say what the web site is for books, for electronics, for furniture - etc and Gary doesn't know the web sites, so no online shopping. If you haven't noticed - this puts a HUGE crimp in our style of shopping ... except when I am heading over (or he is home).

To recap what I am schlepping there for him already: He was called to be the Institute Teacher and he decided he wanted what all the 'big boys' have teaching Institute: a projector that hooks up to your laptop and projects your power point presentation, videos, really anything on your laptop - onto a screen - like Linda had for Sunday School if you are in my ward. This needs a couple of cables, and a 'clicker' (which I forgot to order and will be picking up at Best Buy today). He also wanted an 8G micro SD card for his GPS system he bought that I took with me to Colorado for him to play with. It is for hiking and biking and he bought the maps for the Colorado, Utah, Arizona area plus the ones for Australia so he can go on lengthy bike rides in the 'wild' - alone - and not get lost.

I woke up this morning to an e-mail message 'Your Order With Amazon' dated today - and I freaked. I had put a 'clicker' in the cart just to see if I could get it delivered by Monday and I couldn't so thought that I deleted it. I was all, it is going to get here Tuesday and I won't be here and I will have to bribe Ryan to return it. Then I looked at it and mysteriously it was ordered at 5:45am and was an HP calculator - with a delivery estimate for Tuesday - so apparently I will be grabbing things out of boxes on my way out the door (if it gets here in time) for stuff for the guy (I HOPE it was him that ordered it ...)

So no hope of just a carry on for me ...

But speaking of Amazon, orders and travelling to Australia ... I sort of, well spoiled myself EVEN FURTHER than a baby laptop to play with on the plane. I, um decided that I NEEDED the real PhotoShop software - the real deal, the big kahuna, none of this 'PhotoShop Elements' stuff: a subset of the real thing .... OH, did I mention it is like ... a thousand dollars? Not really, but close - which is my comfort level at purchasing things (if I have the fun money - which I do). And since I was apparently totally out of my head ordering photo editing software - I threw in Adobe LightRoom and bought books on each of them (thus - that 14 hours is going to go by in a flash - it usually does when I am reading books on Photo Editing). It only cost a couple hundred dollars so what the hell? Still more than my PhotoShop Elements 7 cost and that is working fine for me and I will continue to use ... I just decided I was ready for the big time (and apparently out of my head - I have thought about buying it many times, but always decided that it was too expensive to justify ... apparently that flip was switched 'off' in my brain two days ago ...).

I should have plenty of time to play with it (I am assuming I can install it on my laptop - will probably dump it on Gary's computer too, just for a variety of places to sit while playing with it):

You can blame my niece! I was on her blog and she said she had downloaded the 30 day free trial of Adobe LightRoom and proceeded to use it on some photos of her children. They were beautiful and had some manipulations that I really liked that I cannot do in PhotoShop Elements (or at least I have not found out how to do so) I really hope I figure out what she had done with the photos I liked or I will be very disappointed.

And, yes, yet again - I know:

GARY AND I ARE VERY, VERY SPOILED ...