I’m a bachelor again. For almost eight days. All I have to do is take care of myself and a geriatric chihuahua on a hunger strike because his mommy is not home.

Unlike previous home alone events, I have no big projects planned. The last time I cranked out a beadboard wainscot for our downstairs bath and, truth be told, regretted it. At the end of the week I was exhausted and didn’t have much left for my wife and child when they returned.

So this time I’m doing it differently. No big projects. No huge expectations. Just time to get small things done that have been bugging me for months. More than anything else, I am looking forward to being able to breathe. It is almost poetic living a day going from task to task with no interruptions. I can even take a nap if I want.

The only goal I set for myself is to blog every day, so here is the first day. I spent most of last night and tonight taking care of the poor neglected yard. Two weeks of growth and a brush pile that desperately needed to be chipped and composted (four months?) kept me busy once the shadows got long enough to avoid direct sun.

The bulk of today was spent working on one of those tasks that are becoming harder. Moving all my pictures over to another system. Yes, I am abandoning Aperture since Apple is abandoning it. The new Photos app doesn’t do geocoding and I can’t live without that. So it is back to Picasa for me.

As computing changes, the “lock-ins” are changing. It used to be email, or contacts, or word processing or music files. But now that everything is in the cloud, all those computing pieces of functionality are easily transferable across computers, operating systems, and mobile/desktop. Photos are the next big lock-in. Because we now take more pictures with our phones than with standalone cameras, photos are now first processed by our phones first. Both Apple and Google have launched their new services, designed to be the one place to store all your photos. The main difference, at least to me, is that Apple’s can only work on Apple devices but Google’s is cross platform. Since I “go both ways,” I really only have one choice.

Moving pictures is like moving your home. You have to organize and package everything to ensure you don’t lose it when you transfer. So I’ve spent too much time going through all my photos on Aperture and tagging them to reflect the structure in Aperture that can not be transferred to Picasa.

So what would I do if I didn’t have a whole day to figure this out and make it happen? I would feel trapped and frustrated. And so it is with all these other little things that I hope to get off the permanently stalled to-do list. Time to breathe, room to breathe. Selah.