{Day 8} ~ Reflecting On The Season

The prompt for Day 8 for Picture the Holidays was to look at things in a mirror to see things differently. I found this really hard to capture as at the end, the result was no unexpected effect or anything but just my Christmas hanging basket decoration in the mirror. The poinsettia on the right at least looks much better here than in real life. I have my doubts that it'll make it till Christmas.

I love the class and the challenge it offers to try out different things but it is also a lot of work to keep up. For the last few days, I've spent my entire evenings with my camera and computer, not getting to bed before 11.30, which is not a great idea if your alarm clock goes off at 5.30 again. So I've been thinking about taking a break today and spend the evening on the sofa in front of the telly. I've just received the prompt for today, which is "It's a Sign". I take that as a sign then for an evnening off :-).

{Day 1} ~ Gratitude

Yesterday was the first day of Picture the Holidays, and the prompt was "Holding onto Gratitude". What am I grateful for? Lots of things, and 2010 so far has been an especially rotten year, giving even more cause to be grateful about different kinds of things. The idea for the picture for this day though came from the radio, to which I wake up every morning. This time of the year is also the time, when many companies announce their cutting and restructuring plans for the new year. On the news yesterday, yet another of these companies announced their planned job cuts, leaving a few hundred people with a letter of dismissal as a Christmas present and the prospect of facing redundancy in the year year. Some of them may find it especially hard to find a new job, as they never had a chance to get formal training and qualifications and have to put up with low paid jobs they don't enjoy.

I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to do all the trainings and qualifications I wanted to do, to chose where and what I wanted to study, to chose the profession and wanted to and which I love (I'm a librarian). I am grateful that I can fully enjoy the Christmas season  look forward to my Christmas break, knowing that I have a job to get back to in January after the holiday.

The portrait picture is the one I uploaded to the class gallery, the one below I wanted to upload on Flickr as well, but today, Flickr doesn't seem to want me to upload anything. I always get a failure notice and I don't even know why. So annoying. But I keep trying... :-)