January - kittens, music and tech

It's not good to wish time away, but I can't help but be happy every year when the month of January is over. It's such a dreary, bland month of nothingness.

This January has seemed darker than in several years, because of consistent bad weather, either cold and frosty or sideways rain, instead of the usual variable Irish weather. That combined with a variety of terrible world events and existential threats being reported every other day has made this January worse than usual.

But this year I've had something to help me focus on the more cheerful parts of life - Elsa!

This beautiful ball of explosive energy, the mouse-chaser-to-be, is now 13 weeks old and came into our lives just after Christmas. We didn't want another cat but that was before we were invaded my mice. Then we had to make a decision, and were lucky to know people who had a group of kittens, and we collected her on the Saturday after Christmas. Now we can't imagine not having her.

She's either super sweet like kittens are, has a cool style and likes to pose like Venus of Urbino:

Or she's all over the place running around like a lunatic chasing fake mice, exploring places or trying to kill computer cables. I've tried hard to take action photos of her, but most of them end up like this:

So with Elsa around, January passed by quite quickly! I also had some good times in the gym, started indoor cycling again, and enjoyed a bluegrass jam session (where I also lost my one and only perfect-for-flatpicking guitar pick, sigh).

My word of the year, and fun with music

I almost didn't choose a word of the year. I was tired of trying to improve myself and just wanted to relax, enjoy life and have fun. But wait... that's also a word. So that became my word and focus of the year. After some hard years, it's time to do things for fun and focusing on enjoying life. Some may say - can we really do that in today's world? Perhaps it's more important now more than ever. Life is short. I have a lot of things to be grateful for and need to embrace them more and stop worrying about how I'm perceived or whether I'm good at things. Sure, striving towards learning and improving skills is good, but we can still enjoy what we do even if we're mediocre.

So at the bluegrass session I had decided to not take any solos because it was in a busy and quite large pub and I barely heard myself and was very out of practice too. But after a while I realised it wasn't so bad and that "WTF, let's just play something, this is a session, not a gig". So I did, and I loved it, other than the fact that my €60 Bluechip pick was somewhere on the floor never to be seen again.

And yes, 60 euro for a guitar pick! It's a special pick. It's perfect for bluegrass flatpicking and with specifically bevelled edges for a certain sound. Really they're cheaper than that but I had to buy it from the UK, with all the costs that includes after Brexshit. Now those picks are sold out, I don't know when they'll be available again and I'm looking at something made in the Netherlands called Wegen picks, also quite talked about.

These bluegrass sessions give a lot of hope for good times with music this year. It's the best possibility we've ever had to play bluegrass with other people, and is a huge inspiration boost for me to take up a good guitar practice routine again. Definitely a good contribution to the "fun" project!

The tech

I've been doing some tech geekery recently. And it's not about building things (even if I've been doing that too).

I've been an Apple user since 2007. They've created some really great products, but recently some bad rumours have been going round about the future of Apple, including enforced AI, and various privacy concerns. Apple has been very low key about all the negative developments in tech, but it's beginning to show that they're too much of a Silicon valley big corporation and it now feels icky to be too entangled in and dependent on their ecosystem.

So before Christmas I started exploring Linux, to learn how it works, what I can do with it, and how I like using it. I used one of my husband's old laptops and installed first Manjaro, then Ubuntu, and later Zorin OS (built on top of Ubuntu). And I must say I'm very pleased - so pleased that now during January we bought a new laptop for me to use, like the other one but newer with more power.

It came with Windows 11 (ugh!) preinstalled and I just quickly booted it up to see if it was alive, then switched it off again and immediately installed Zorin 18.

With Linux you install it from a CD or bootable USB drive, it comes with some apps preinstalled and you can get more from various repositories or downloading online. No logins, no AI (unless you install it yourself), no centralised bullshit. I'm a big fan. Some of you will know that I'm not 100% hating AI, some of it is useful, but I want to decide for myself what tools to have on my computer and when to use them and for what, not have the system throw everything in my face.

You can tweak the system with plugins and/or commandline tools if you want to, I've done a few bits and pieces to reach remote servers and to install what I need to preview my blog posts locally but I generally keep it quite simple.

The only drawback with Linux is graphic design, there are no real graphic design apps for Linux. People will mention Gimp and Inkscape, but they are two terrible pieces of software if you come from interfaces like Adobe and Affinity. There's a nice app called Boxy SVG which is acceptable for illustration and simpler vector design, and there are good programs for photo editing à la Lightroomm but that's about it. I'm following the development of an app called Graphite (there's an in-browser version here and I'm testing a very early version of the desktop app), but Boxy is the only one I find useful for now.

Of course graphic design is non-negotiable for me and I absolutely need something Photoshop-like and something for layout. Canva has mentioned interest in making a native Linux app for Affinity so we'll see if anything happens with that. Some people have had success with installing the Windows version of Affinity on other Linux distributions, and I might experiment with that on the older computer during the spring. In the meantime I still have the Mac which is still a very solid machine so for now there's no reason to go 100% Linux. But I've ended up liking Linux a lot more than Mac, and now I only use the Mac for graphic design and some programming. Who would have thought a few months ago??

Other things I've been up to

As always at this time of the year, I'd love to do more photography. All the ideas for indoor photography went down the drain with Elsa... she's a whirlwind and I can't have any fancy setups with light tents and the likes while she's young and playful and wants to explore everything. It'll be different when she's ready to go outdoors. What I can do now is photograph everyday objects but I haven't found a way to make it look interesting.. yet. I have hundreds of photos of Elsa, and two photos of coffee and that's it. I got a comment on Foto the other day from a lovely photographer in Michigan (or something like it) "you should stick that 50 mm to your camera and point it at something". A nice hint that it's time I take some new photos.

We also have a lot of projects coming up in the camera club this spring and I need to get to work. The good thing this year is that I don't have all the self-doubt and imposter syndrome with the camera that I had earlier. I just want to take more photos and have fun with it.

I took a walk today, with the camera of course, and enjoyed taking photos of anything that caught my interest. Previously I had been shooting something indoors with a custom white balance, and hadn't thought of putting it back to auto, so the colours were out of whack in all of today's photos. I'm desperately tweaking the colours in most of them, but in this one it had a cool effect!

In case you are one of those who miss what Instagram used to be, love photos and looking at photos, I highly recommend the Foto app. It's 100% still photography and it's not only for serious photographers. If you love photos you can download the app and join! It's a beautiful, slow, fresh breath of air after some years of exhausting short form video everywhere. And follow me there! You need the smartphone app but it's free. And no, I'm not paid to say this. It's just a great app.

When I started writing this post I felt "I haven't done anything at all during January!!" and look how long this post became.

With this post I'm joining Natalie's new Monthly wrap-up link-up. I hope you had a good month of January and despite all the weird things that happened around the world, I hope you were able to do something that made you happy.