Beautiful Oops! is an interactive book for ages 3 and up. So I bought it for myself this week. I love its philosophy–don’t be upset when you make mistakes or things don’t go the way you expect. Instead be creative.
Andy and I have had plenty of practice doing that this year, of course, and I had another chance just yesterday. I was playing around with some new techniques in Photoshop and decided I would try them out on a picture of our shed. I had spent hours and hours organizing the pictures of the land into well-named folders and subfolders and knew exactly where I could find the picture. Oops! All the folders and subfolders were there, but the pictures were gone. What??
Time to trot out the magic words: “What’s the opportunity here? What can I learn from this?” So I went off and did some chores while I pondered the matter. I had checked some of my backups– the files had disappeared weeks ago. It eventually dawned on me I had installed a new photo managing program a few months ago. So I checked the receipt– I had bought it January 9th. Sure enough, the files had disappeared between the backups of January 7th and January 16th. Mystery solved. The program had moved the files to a folder of its own choosing, and since I knew the names of the individual files it was easy enough to track down where that folder was.
For now I’m just going to rebuild my own folder system and put it on an external hard drive so it will be safe. In the future I’ll take the time to understand the new photo management program and see if it’s worth it. Andy loved it when he was using it on the PC and was putting off managing his new pictures until the program was available on the Mac. I bought it for him when the Mac version came out early last year, but he hasn’t gotten back to looking at his pictures yet. At least he’s been warned that his new version doesn’t work exactly the way his old one did. 😉
I wouldn’t exactly call this a beautiful oops!, but it was definitely educational. If nothing else it reinforced the importance of keeping centered and being patient. Any oops! in your life lately?
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