I'd rather wait for paint to dry

There was a time, not that long ago, where all the amazing websites for photo sharing, photo album making, scrapbooking, etc. threatened to overwhelm a creative gal with a constant itch for making pretty arrangements of pictures. I mean, really, how lucky are we... all these awesome sites where you can upload all of your pics and make mugs, and albums, and calendars, and mousepads, and jigsaw puzzles all customized out of your own candid snapshots. Tee-shirts. Christmas ornaments. Tote bags. Posters. Paintings. You know how it is.

Yeah, well guess what: I am COMPLETELY over it.

I've been sitting around waiting for the past twenty minutes for my screen to catch up with my creativity. I'm in the middle of making a calendar and twenty minutes later, I'm still working on January for godssakes. On Shutterfly. Or Kodak Gallery-slash-ofoto. Or Snapfish. Or whichever, I won't specify which, they all pretty much operate the same.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love/hate all those sites equally. It's just that they offer so many avenues of exciting things you can do with your pics that were unthinkable of doing even five years ago without spending a ton of money making it happen. I've made many great coffee table books that I'm proud of, but it wasn't until this week I remembered why I am so done with the whole process.

Chris Rollins loves to scrapbook, and she'd been talking about this scrapbooking site--- which, you can arrange pics, photo-album-style, with even more caption space -- just like a scrapbook... then they print up that bad-boy, and send it to you, pretty and bound like a book. So I thought, well I haven't dabbled with any of photos in a while, let's check it out.

And then I remembered why I stopped doing it: because of how frigging long the whole process takes. And I don't mean how long it takes those people to print up your book and send it. I mean how freaking long it takes for your computer to render your pictures and put them where they need to go. GOD FORBID you might need to re-size the picture, or make minor tweaks to the color or the cropping. Someone grab me a copy of War & Peace!

No offense to any specific site. They all have fun ideas I'd love to utilize for my own happy memories. But frankly, my happy memories are getting eclipsed by the many moments of my lifetime that are ticking by while I wait for Uncle Morty's red-eye to disappear.

Is my computer slow? Is my internet slow? I've tried at work, I've tried at home (yes, maybe I've been tried in the studio in the middle of my shift). Still worse than waiting for paint to dry. I mean, what was I expecting -- you upload all your pictures online, and expect this free web-based program to be functionally easy to use? I know I'm asking for a lot, but my sanity isn't worth a pretty little calendar full of wacky photos I took of friends while they weren't looking.

My dad wants to fill up his vacation house with a calendar similar to one I made him last year (when I was less hateful to the photo-album-websites). He asked me a couple weeks ago, and I couldn't figure out why I was stalling, (like I couldn't put it together with my horrendous online-scrapbooking attempt). And to make this task even more enjoyable, he's uploaded 53 pictures to choose from to fill up his 12 month calendar. (And by "enjoyable", I'm referring to the kind of joy brought on while waiting for paint to dry). 53 pictures that each take 5-10 seconds to load on the screen just so I can look at it.

The next 12 months of my life are going to pass before I even get close to getting this done.
Anybody maybe got an Jessica Alba 2008 calendar they wanna sell me?

(Hey good news, January finally finished processing! Oh crap, did I just cut off Grandpa's head? GAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!)