MUDPIX OUTDOORS

My daily journal for April 2023. Check this post daily for new updates.

Sunday, April 2nd, 2023:

4:52 AM CST – IT’S 4TH MONTH 2023 ALREADY – It’s April 2023 already. That’s unbelievable. Ok so I haven’t written in my journal for a few days. Over the past week during my time off, I spent the entire 4 days doing nothing but making pixel art in the Cross-Stitch World app. I did not plan on spending all of my time like that. It just happened. It happened because I started a new gallery for my art, and then I got hung up on making new art for the gallery. I don’t regret spending my time doing that. It was relaxing, and I got some great “zone out” time to get my mind clear on some things. Over the course of this weekend, I have tried to pick up my productivity to get back on track with my blogging, gallery building, and other things related to my entire online existence. It’s going slow lol… but at least it’s going. I’m working on a new blog series called Inbox Resources. It’s a roundup of articles, websites, and YouTube videos I’ve been saving links for. This will become a regular series (posted at least once a month, or more if I curate enough content). I hope to have the first blog post ready to publish within a few days.

5:00 AM CST – HEARING LOSS UPDATE – Ok it’s been nearly 3 weeks since I experienced my initial hearing loss. Things have gotten a little better. Sounds are still muffled, but I can make out video sounds from YouTube being heard on my laptop speaker where this was nearly impossible before. Some high pitch sounds are coming back. To give an example of what I mean by muffled sounds, yesterday my lawn care person who cuts my grass came by to cut my grass for the first time in this Spring season. I was in bed at the time. When he started his lawn mower, I thought someone was driving down the street with huge speakers in their car booming. His lawnmower sounded like a low bass sound that you would hear from high power speakers coming down the street. It’s been several days since I have used my ear drops. I will use them again during my off days period. For a minute I was getting worried that I would need to seek medical treatment, but now that my hearing has seemed to clear up some, I’m just going to keep using the ear drops and see how that goes. I was very happy to see my yard taken care of after the grass was cut as the grass was starting to look crazy already this year. My yard is a pet peeve. It’s usually kept in better maintenance than the inside of my home. Don’t judge me lol.

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023:

9:27 AM CST – I’m not supposed to be awake right now. I should be sleeping so that I can stay on track with my night time schedule. My sleep pattern is off. I’m just going with the flow. This week during my off time I have been working on crocheting up some new beanies for myself. I’ve sat in my home office over the past two days crocheting and watching videos on YouTube. I designed a new slouchy beanie using a spiral pattern with half-double crochet stitches, and I love how the pattern turned out. I’m trying to bust some of my huge yarn stash. I completed two beanies, and started a 3rd one. I don’t have time to do any more crocheting this week, but I’ll see how it goes. I have a lot of website work I should be trying to catch up on.

9:32 AM CST – HEARING LOSS UPDATE – My ears are still clogged up. I haven’t used my ear drops this week like I said that I would. That’s just me being totally lazy about it, and waiting to see if the problem will just clear up on it’s own, and because I really hate the feeling of fluid in my ears. Sounds are still muffled, but I’m managing through it. I can’t watch YouTube and listen to music without feeling overly annoyed at any muffled sounds. I don’t want to have conversations with anyone because it’s a strain sometimes to focus attention on what they’re saying. I don’t like conversations in general anyway lol. So this hearing loss update is basically me admitting that I haven’t been taking care of myself like I should this week in regards to getting my ears unclogged. Maybe I’m enjoying the peacefulness of slight silence?

6:30 PM CST – A LOT HAPPENED TODAY AND IT’S ALL GREAT – Since I last wrote this morning, I have had a busy and productive day. I am proud of myself. I didn’t expect that I would accomplish all that I have today. I have managed to make 3 really cool things happen for me today. First, I’ve moved my DudeCapz Beanie Store to Etsy after deciding it’s time to boost my participation in getting that business off the ground. I’m going to stop selling on Storenvy. I haven’t had any issues with selling on Storenvy, but my sales are literally null and void there. That’s probably mostly my fault for not promoting my products. Hopefully that can change and I’ll start getting my business off to a good start with my handmade beanies. I’ve heard that Etsy has been working on building visibility of products on it’s platform through advertising and I hope that this can help me gain brand recognition for my beanie store. I’ve heard that they also increased their fees, so I’m not sure how that is going to cut into my earnings, but I’m staying positive about it since Etsy is more widely known than Storenvy is. Second, I reconnected with an old Yahoo email address I’ve had for over 15 years. I don’t know why I felt it important to do so since I’ve rarely ever used it the entire time I’ve had it, but it is connected to at least one important account I have with WordPressDotCom. Third, speaking of WordPressDotCom, I reconnected with an account that has an old (and still important to me) ebook blog on it. Due to non-use of the account for years (since 2013), forgetting about the account (which led to losing my login info for the account), I’ve lost touch basically with everything on the account. But today, I managed to put pieces together that was available on the blog that helped me figure out my login information. Now I have connection to that account again and I can start moving content appropriately from there to here on my website if I decide to do so. All of these things are steps in the right directions for me, and I hope to continue making more steps the right direction to better serve my customers and fans of my photography and blog content. I really have a lot of work ahead of me now to get my Etsy store on the move, but I’m excited about it. I plan on trying to do at least one listing on Etsy each day that I have to spend in my home office if time permits. That means I’m going to be crocheting my fingers off, as well as trying to get all of my blogging work done that I need to do.

7:26 PM CST – I forgot there was one more thing that happened today for me I didn’t mention at 6:30 PM CST that is kind of a big deal. I’ve advanced my skills in Affinity Photo by learning how to use Adjustments on layers for color, brightness, and contrast (normally I just do auto-levels. I also learned how to use empty mask layers so that I can more properly fit things in an image (such as my Etsy listing items), rather than trying to just crop an image. These two things really helped me to make some nice images today for my Etsy listing.

Photo credit: David Thrift, taken at West Overlook Viewpoint, at West Point Lake, on Thursday, May 5th, 2023 at 6:58 AM CST.

Buy My Ebooks:

Find and purchase all of my ebooks here in my ebook store at Gumroad. You will find my MUDPIX MAGAZINE photo ebook series which features hundreds of my outdoor photos taken at Lake Harding, and West Point Lake in Alabama and Georgia. You will also find my Encyclopedia Of Wikipedia (great for Wikipedia buffs), and also my UNSPLASHED photo ebook series, a free ebook series, which features photography from great photographers at Unsplash. Your purchase of my ebooks and support of my work is very much appreciated!!

Get The Latest Issue Of My MUDWALKER NEWSLETTER:

In April 2022, I began writing and sharing my newsletter, titled MUDWALKER. This newsletter comes with my latest site updates, and also lots of other content such as links to useful & interesting websites, music lists, resources, and more. It is a free pdf published monthly between the 1st and 5th of each month (sometimes earlier depending on my schedule). You can get the latest issue here.

Lists:

A large part of what makes DDAVIDD.com a great resource for information, are the lists I write and maintain. Check out the lists below that may interest you.

• Featured Front Page YouTube Videos 2022

Podcast Spotlights (in planning coming soon):

Podcast Spotlights are a new thing I started doing in September 2020. I have to admit that I don’t listen to many podcasts myself personally. If I do listen to one, it’s usually the Armin Van Buuren’s ASOT (A State Of Trance) podcast. My Podcast Spotlights are a way for me to connect with more favorite Podcasts, while also highlighting some that you may enjoy. See the list below of the current Podcast Spotlights. UPDATE: Apparently I deleted the posts for this segment of my website. Perhaps I had a change of focus. Maybe I’ll bring the spotlights back at some point.