Adding Pictures

There will no doubt be many things to learn about blogging that I didn’t think of before I started. After posting last week I decided entries should be shorter, that each entry needed more white space (space not filled with text, whatever the background color), and that graphics or pictures would add interest. None of these things come naturally for me. I’ve never been the picture-taker—I dislike technical details and machines while Ken was a photographer in the navy. He's always taken the pictures, but now I’m motivated to learn.


I plan to expand my efforts later to focus on people (with expressions!) and the great outdoors, but I started by focusing on our living area where nothing moves. I’m inserted them in last week’s post—to make it visually interesting.


Nothing is simple. First pictures are loaded from the camera into the computer—Ken said he would help me with that for a season. Then they're moved from computer files into the blog, a complicated procedure I'm learning. I'm trying to accept this as a challenge to keep my mind active, supple, and young. I think it's working because my brain hurts as I forge new connections between my brain cells. By the time I've learned how to handle it, my IQ will be 5 points higher.


Because I thought this week's blog also needed visual interest, I looked through pictures still in the camera to find one I didn’t think I'd use later. The camels below qualified and I think they’re amazing. I asked Ken to take the picture in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, a little over a year ago when we visited our oldest son and his family who live there. Can you relate to painted animals? In North Dakota we have painted bison in Fargo and painted horses in Minot. Someone told me a city on the West Coast features painted pigs. Do you also think the possibilities of an epidemic are a little bit frightening? But the Arabs know what Americans think is cool—so why shouldn’t Abu Dhabi have painted camels? Then again, maybe they started it and we copied the idea from them.