you find out, once again, that  you weren’t half as smart as you’d like to think you are.

*totally disgruntled look marring my lovely visage*

In an attempt to hit the ground running I have been trying to think of the various topics that are fairly boiling over in this head of mine. You know, all the reasons why I’ve decided it’d probably be best to start this blog and shift direction a bit in my life as a lactivist. I’ve got a healthy little list of draft post titles. Some of them I think are pretty hilarious – though I suppose I’ll have to wait and see if anyone agrees with me.

Part of the getting ready process has been trying to figure out how to get my hands on nice pictures that I can use without falling afoul of copyright. I have friends I’ll eventually get around to asking for pics but I wanted to get the show on the road without pestering all and sundry for their digital memories.

I went ahead and purchased a few photos from fotolia.com and headed over to stock.xchng as well. I kept poking around and poking around because I wanted to find a fairly healthy stable of pictures before I started posting to make things easier on myself as I dip my toes into the blogging pool.

Then I stumbled onto the Creative Commons area of Flickr and thought I had died and gone to heaven. All those pics and the members had given specific permission ahead of time! Yippee! Click…click…click…Click-Click-clickclickclick…. Hours of right clicking and saving to my computer. Oh the plans! Lots of lovely plans for sorting them by license specifics to make sure I used the photos correctly, then cropping and optimizing. It was going to be a week-end of fun with me and my Adobe Photoshop program. *Yawn* It was late. I was tired. I went to bed with a file folder stuffed to the gills with a mix of creative commons photos just waiting for me to sort them out and visions of what I would do dancing behind my eyes.

Then I learned something.

I can’t search flickr by file names like I can at stock.xchng. Oh no! no, no, no, no NO! That….well, that makes me very, very sad because now I’m going to have to wade back through Flickr and try and find all these photos all over again and if I can’t I’m going to have to stash them and not use them, which I think might very well make me cry.

Wish me luck and hand me my waders. I think this is going to be a long, long night.