On learning

Learning! I have just as much learning to do now as when I was working all the time.

The amount that I have to learn hit me again today, as I encountered yet one more thing to add to my “Need to learn soon” list. We’re planning a trip and I want to take my husband’s camcorder, which I have not used in years mostly because it refuses to play nice with my Mac. I can edit the video but I’ll need to re-learn how. It would also be nice to take along the audio recorder I bought last fall, which -- thanks to the busy-ness of the days since then -- I haven’t learned how to use yet. And once I get video and audio, I’ll need to relearn iMovie.  I knew an early version pretty well, but I have a new computer with the latest version and everything is different.

I also need to speed up my Spanish learning, which is proving more challenging than I thought. (When I try to call a Spanish phrase to mind, the French one comes instead.) And Spanish seems as frustratingly non-standard as English is. If only it were like amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant, I could remember it better.

Less urgent but still nagging at me is the recognition I must learn more about Photoshop. Every time I tackle a photo of a grandkid or a beautiful flower, I need to blur or smudge or layer something and too often the result looks amateurish. I’ve got lots of resources to use for learning – and I have lots of time now, right?

Waiting patiently are the Great Courses I ordered from The Teaching Company. One is about jazz, one is about geology, and one is about meteorology. I have been curious about the weather patterns around our house, which have changed in the past decade, diverting most heavy rainfall. Half the time the radar shows the rains swerving north and northwest of us; many other times it shows the rains approaching, then dividing, each fork neatly swinging around our area and rejoining on the other side. It’s baffling. It’s probably a fantasy that I can learn enough from a Great Course on meteorology to explain this phenomenon but I thought I could try.

That’s not even a complete list of the things I plan to learn soon, but it’s a start. I need now to go do a review of the Spanish flashcards I have posted around the house. Chao.

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