Looking back

Recently, Jude from Mature not senile posted about a new member in their family. She is mom to a little white Westie, just like Duke. She was asking about how long it took for Duke to get all fuzzafied (my word, not hers) and so I decided to take a look back at some old pictures of him. All I could find were some that I had either edited in some way or put into a scrapbook page but I'm going to share those with you today.

This was one of those edits done in my early learning stages. Extractions still aren't my strong point but I can hide it a little better now. I'm pretty sure that was taken the day we brought him home. He was such a little cutie I fell in love the minute I saw him.

His eyes look blue here but they really aren't.

 

The date on this file was January 2008

I'm pretty sure this one was taken shortly before he got his very first Westie cut. I sort of like him all shaggy looking but it drives Wade nuts so we do get him groomed just not as often as we should.  The background paper for this layout is a picture of the forsythia bush with the cave opening....lol Wish I could remember who's kit I used to make the layout so I could add a link but I have no clue. If this is yours let me know and I'll give you credit.

Who's blogging?

Well it certainly wasn't me yesterday. I really do have every intention of posting on a daily basis but then again I could say that about a lot of things.

I don't have much for today either. I'm just going to leave you with a few things I've done recently while trying to avoid more productive things.

This one is a picture of a little angel I have. It's just got such a cute face.

Here's another one of those just messing around things. When I got to this point with it, I thought it sort of looked like a bunch of pieces of folded paper.

I took a picture of a mirror I have that has this rose on it. I turned it into a line drawing then colored it.

That's all folks :)

Talking it over

Over the weekend I decided it was finally time that Duke and I had a talk about his behavior in front of the camera.

I explained that if he wanted to be a part of this blog that he was going to have to be more cooperative about having his picture taken.

He argued that I post all kinds of pictures and very few of them are of me. I cleverly countered with the fact that I was the one operating the camera, therefor I couldn't be in front of it.

He had to think about that one for a minute.

In the end, he made the decision to be a good boy and sit nice for the camera. But...

 

He said he couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't still get an occasional blurry shot.

Randomness

To update you all on my daughters travels, she made it there safe and sound. I think I may be in trouble though because she sent me a text today saying that she was surprised I didn't have that on here. I was getting there I've just been lazy busy.

I've been trying to get myself motivated to start some crafty type projects but all I seem to do is collect links to things I want to try. I'm great when it comes to planning and making lists but actually doing the stuff I'm such a procrastinator.

I am however a little better at making things in pse. I think it's because when I do it on the computer I can delete it, nothing to clean up and if I screw something up I haven't wasted anything but time. With that being said here's some of my latest.

This one I made some shapes and then turned them into brushes. After I made a design I liked I made it into a semi-seamless pattern. Then I added a gradient layer over top of it and ended up with this.

This one started out as a picture of that blue light on my bamboo tablet. Just did a bunch of messing around with it until I came up with this. I don' t especially care for it all that much but I saved it anyway.

This one is my favorite. I'm using this one as my desktop background right now. I just started playing around with brushes painting on color and it took off from there.

Well that's it for today. Hopefully I can get Duke to fill in for me a day or two this week.

Colorado here she comes

Did you know that Colorado Springs Colorado is 1482 miles away from the small Pennsylvania town that I live in? Well of course you didn't and until recently, neither did I. So why is this important? Because my daughter left this morning to move there. She stopped by before I left for work to say good-bye and all I could do was give her a hug and tell her to drive careful. Then I cried all the way to work.
I sent her a text at lunch time and she was in Indianapolis and then around 4:00 I got a text saying 37 miles to St. Louis. She has one of her friends going with her and they plan on driving straight through. I told her that I don't care what time she gets there, I want a phone call to let me know she made it.
Since I'm a little on the sad side tonight, this is it for the blog post. Be back tomorrow

What happened to loyalty

 

 

 

oops it seems to have cut off the edge of the last picture. It says "I like pops today". Little brat even has his nose up in the air...lol

Backwards

This is my version of a backwards post. While all of you are doing a wordless Wednesday, I chose to do a worded version with no picture. Why am I doing it that way? Because I'm being lazy and sitting on the couch with my laptop instead of at my desk. If you don't like that excuse, I have more.
Excuse #2- I don't have any pictures ready to use
Excuse #3- My dog ate my blog post
Excuse #4- My camera battery is dead
Excuse #5- The electricty went out so I couldn't see to edit (are you thinking about this one?)
Excuse #6- I spent too much time stumbling and didn't have time to prepare
Excuse #7- My mother said I wasn't allowed
Excuse #8- The queen stopped in for tea and I didn't want to be rude
Excuse #9- My brain froze because of all the snow we've had around here
Excuse #10-

Yes I know #10 is blank, that's because I could only think of 9

I'll try and do better tomorrow

Fun with bamboo

No I don't mean bamboo as in the plant. I'm talking about Wacom's Bamboo fun. If you don't know what it is, check out the link. If you do any kind of editing it's a very handy thing to have. A couple of you had asked how I did my drawings on the computer. Of course the program I create them in is Photoshop elements. (Do you ever get tired of me saying photoshop elements?) When I'm drawing though, instead of using a mouse I use my bamboo fun tablet and pen.

I have the smallest one there is but since I bought it a couple years ago, I couldn't live without it. Since you're using a pen, it's more like the real thing and it's so much easier to erase parts of pictures as well. You get much more control with the pen than you ever could with a mouse. It also looks really cool in the dark.

See the glowing blue circle at the top of it? This is one of my favorite toys.

Dreaming

Daydreaming about warmer weather. No matter how old I get it's still fun to draw. It's even more fun doing it on the computer because there's no paper wasted and clean up is soooooooooo much easier :)

What's on the bottom of your shoe

I promise that if you bear with me

This will all make sense

I was planning on spending the weekend just hanging out

I had my feet up and realized how much I really hate the cheapo slippers I bought at the dollar store.

Since Amanda and I were going to go out shopping anyway on Saturday I put slippers on the list. Just being me, I took a picture of the bottom of my new slippers

I never noticed when I bought them what a cute design they had on the bottom of them. When I saw the picture I had to play with it in photoshop elements.

Ok I'll be the first to admit that I have a REALLY boring life but at least I know how to entertain myself. So what's on the bottom of your shoe?

Friday night guessing game

Can you guess what this is? This is straight off the camera I didn't do a thing to it.

I could, of course, just give you the answer right away. But what fun would that be?

As for me and my new camera we have done a lot of playing together. I've tried out a few different things but I have to admit that I really don't know the camera all that well. I probably should read the manual that came with it but I have such a hard time with things like that. They are so boring to me and half the time I don't understand what it's saying anyway. With my last camera I did read the manual. Well sort of. The problem was, I would have to read a sentence several times before I could understand it. It's a darn good thing I'm not in school any more because I would probably flunk out.

Enough of the filler. I'll just give you the answer and you can go on with your weekend. I took the picture through the front window. It was starting to get dark out and there was a car going down the street so I just focused on something and then followed the car as I took the picture. I'm not sure if it's my imagination or not but it almost looks like the outline of a car underneath the big white line. Either that or it's from the huge pile of snow out there. The large white line near the top I believe was from the light that was shining from the top of my neighbors garage.

Can you say YUMMMMMMY

I'm posting a little earlier than I usually do tonight so as not to lose track of time once again and try scrambling to get it done. Like I said yesterday, Amanda came over to make dinner for us. It was a casserole that's called Baked Penne and Smoked Sausage.

I took the lazy way out here. If you aren't able to read this and want the recipe let me know and I will type the whole thing out. She also rewrote it but it's on 2 sides of the paper so it would have required 2 pictures. But I do have a picture of the special note she left at the end.

I found this really amusing because it was her idea that I use this as a blog post. The reason I think it's funny is because my family has NEVER taken an interest in my blog what so ever.

Duke of course was right there to supervise. But of course any time Amanda comes over he's all over her.

This recipe really made him sit up and take notice.

And the finished meal. The verdict is, while it's not really Wade's kind of meal he did at least it eat. Me on the other hand, I went back for a second helping. I thought it was fantastic. I'm not just saying that because Amanda made it either.

Slacker

Duke and I are being slackers tonight but with a good reason. My daughter came over and made us dinner so we spent time with her instead of working on a blog post. We did get some pictures and her recipe though so we'll be sharing that with you tomorrow. Unless of course we decide to slack for one more day.

Duke day

Shake shake shake

this smells like someone else has been playing with it

The bone or the ball, which one?

Oh, hello, I didn't see you there.

You want to play with me? I'll take this end you grab the other end OK?

Go away, I'm watching football

I'm not the one watching football. It's Duke. I could if I wanted to but it's never really held my interest long enough to make me want to.

He was doing everything possible to avoid looking at me and my camera. Since he was busy with the game I went in search of other things to do.

Check out these shadows on my bedroom blinds.

Nope, no messages

Here fishy fishy fishy

Orange you glad you stopped by for a slice of my day

In case you're wondering that's a piece of a dried orange slice. What do you want? I've taken enough pictures of my backyard and icicles.

A day off

It's Saturday, no work today and even the snow took a break. Of course it's still cold but at least we didn't get any more snow. This was taken looking out my back door this morning.

Here's one from this afternoon. The sun was actually shining. I'm not sure which one of you sent it but THANK YOU. Next time could you include a little bit more heat with it?

I didn't do a whole lot today.

I played on the computer visiting some blogs, reading email and editing some pictures.

I played with my camera a little until the battery died.

I took a nap.

I made another attempt at figuring out a crochet pattern for a rectangular granny square blanket.

Oh, yeah,, housework, I swept the kitchen floor AND wiped off the bathroom counter.

Well since it's a whole whopping 4 degrees out right now, I think I'll go find a nice warm blanket and curl up.

Blame it on the snow

It has to be all the snow that is making me do strange things. I think, however, that there are several people who know me personally that would most likely disagree with that. Who cares what they think. It's the snow. That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Well now that I have that new camera I want to play. My only problem is the darn snow. It's keeping me cooped up in the house and let me tell you, there are not very many interesting things to take pictures of in my house.

I've taken a few out the window. Here's a real impressive one.

Alright, maybe impressive wasn't quite the right word for it. But pictures like this do have value. You can make cool things like this with it.

I guess I've been back on the kaleidoscope kick again. Every time I make one of these things I have to open it up in photoshop elements and play some more.

I call this "Fire and Ice"

Since today is Friday that means I have 2 whole days to do more of something. I haven't quite figured out what that something is yet. If it turns out like most weekends something will mean that I do a whole lot of nothing.