On failing, and then not.

Given that I work in science education, reading over and over articles and websites and books that stress the importance of trying things out yourself, it is surprising how often I still forget to apply that to everyday life. I have spent, my usual, 5 hours thinking about this bathroom light contact paper cover. I have found that there are no single hole punches of the office supply variety for sale in Switzerland (I refuse, so far, to buy a craft one with smaller holes, for $17). I have seen all sorts of images on my Google searches for Scandinavian designs, patterns, animals, and Mid Century Modern designs, patterns, animals. I've gone from the idea of abstract shapes to sheep silhouettes, to fish, to triangles arranged all over the place when I realized how poorly one pair of scissors cut contact paper.

I had two pieces cut out with the nasty scissors, that were rough on the edges, was just thinking how to get my hands on a friend's hole puncher since the cheap two hole one I bought really is for Swiss bills only, and this morning I finally got fed up. I found the better scissors, I told myself just to try something, anything, to get a feel for the light, the material, the results.

And there it is. I'm done, happy enough with it, it dims the light as I wanted, and since it is a nasty fluorescent lamp, the cover on it was plastic that doesn't get very warm. Perfect for white contact paper.

And I have a much better sense for working with the stuff now. There really is no substitute for learning something in context, instead of just trying to perfect the idea before even touching, playing, ripping, and messing up the material.

I'm thinking that any design tradition that embraces imperfect lines and organic shapes, is the one for me.

In other news, I realized last night that upgrading the desktop computer to iLife (iPhoto) '11 has deleted all my photos of A and anything else from before one year ago. Her whole first year pretty much, and M and my life together before that. I am extremely disappointed with Apple. I have all the photos also on my laptop which will never be getting that upgrade, so I am just pissed off instead of completely destroyed and emotionally broken. On some of the Mac forums, people are chiding those who did not back up their computers and actually lost their kids' first many years of life photos, comparing it to preparing for a natural disaster. Because, of course, we all decide to upgrade to earthquake '11 as soon as it hits the stores and we should treat a company like Apple as a force of nature, and not expect more from it. Uh huh.