lack of sleep = discovery of Picasa

I am awake at 6:15 on a Saturday morning. I can't even wake up at that time during the week, so how's it possible I am unable to sleep on the ONE DAY I am allowed to sleep in? It's because I did not take my little blue pill. Yes, I, Joelle Jean, have a sleep problem. It started in October last year, just after the stress of my job drove me over the edge. I thought it was all mental, and the reason that I didn't sleep is because I thought I couldn't sleep. Mostly it was because I had a lot on my mind.

So last night I'm all, "It's Saturday tomorrow, I can sleep in till one if I want, my brain's gonna know this and I will sleep like a hundred year old log in a petrified forest." WRONG. Because you know what my brain thought instead at 6:00am? It thought "Oh crap, I've gotta go to work in a few hours." When my consciousness kicked in, I remembered it was Saturday. This did not help. I refused to get out of bed for a while, then figured I should just start my day, make myself tired, and crash at 1:30 in the afternoon for a nap. Hence, I am blogging in the early hours of a Saturday.

Friends, I have to tell you, I have BEEN A MORON! This post is going all cap happy on you, but it's probably just because I only slept for five hours last night. I have finally discovered the glory that is Google's Picasa web albums. Oh. My. Word. Why did no one stress to me the ease of such a thing? I knew about Picasa. I just never checked it out. Moron. Basically, I should just accept the fact that everything on Google is extremely useful. This year I finally started using Google Docs (great for documents I want to work on at work and at home), Google Reader (so I only check the blogs that have new content on them), and Google Calendar (come on Joelle, really?).

Let me tell you about Picasa, in case you have been living in the dark closet of naivety like I have. I've only explored Picasa fifteen minutes ago, but I very quickly found the geniusness in it. Let me list the ways.
1. It's free.
2. It's linked to your Google account.
3. It is super easy to find and upload pictures that are already on your computer.
4. It's speedy quick like a jack rabbit.
5. It's directly linked to Picnik, which is my favorite way to edit the crappy photos I take.
6. You can send your pictures directly to Walgreens (or another place) to get printed. In like, four seconds.
7. A monkey could use it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some chimps living in the New York Zoo have been utilizing Picasa for the past year or whatever, to organize all the photos they take of tourists who act like morons.

I very rarely take photos, because I am not good at it in any way, but every now and then I like to print out the memories on some glossy 5 X 7 paper and stick it behind a window of glass. In my previous life before Picasa, this is all the dumb stuff I had to do in order to get a good picture printed:
1. Upload a photo, one by one, onto Picnik to edit it. Because like I said, I am a crappy photographer. I know I can somewhat fix this by tweaking the lighting and whatnot on Picnik.
2. Save the edited photo from Picnik onto my computer.
3. Upload that photo into an album on Walgreen's photo site.
4. Select the album to be printed from Walgreen's.
5. Order prints, wait an hour or two, then drive five blocks to pick them up.

Now I can eliminate some steps. Life just keeps getting easier. Thank you, Picasa. Sorry I have been ignoring you for so long.