Younger Than Springtime

The Great Hard Drive Reformatting Disaster of 2009 has taken its toll on my craft: some of my programs and applications have not yet been reinstalled, so I can't fiddle around with my pictures the way I normally do. Probably this means that I will have to learn to work Photoshop, which I tried to do once before and my brains nearly leaked out my ears. (Mostly I use the generic photo editor that comes with MS Office, although sometimes I also use the Picnik features that come with Flickr -- but even then the really fancy stuff costs extra money, and I already paid $25 so that I could have more than 200 pictures in my photostream, which G thinks is insane, but I do this for you people.)

Anyway, the point of all of this is that for a few days, anyway, some of the pictures might not look quite the same as always, because I am trying to make do with Paint and Notepad until I get around to putting Office* back on my machine. So why don't we just pretend that this picture of Cupcake checking out My Anonymous Mother's pussywillows** for the first time is just as cute as we normally pretend my pictures are, OK?***

* = Before you say anything, I tried OpenOffice before. I didn't hate it, but it made my computer do really strange things. Like, Linda-Blair's-head-spinning-around weird. We may try it again, now that we have done a complete wipe of the system, but negotiations are still ongoing. Not sure what we are going to do, as I really like MS Publisher and can't find an open-source equivalent. Accepting suggestions. Please be kind, and remember that I am a Luddite who already knows that she should just get a Mac already.

** = THAT'S WHAT THE PLANT IS CALLED. Don't be pervy. Perv.

*** = Yes, I know I am a terrible photographer. SHUT UP. These pics were taken with my iPhone, though, and I think for camera phone pictures they are pretty OK.