Skink with five lines

This is a photo that Mike took with his cell phone (which is now my cell phone since I got it when he & Joycie got new phones). Mike and his friend, Nick, saw this Five-lined Skink (aka Blue Tail Lizard to some). It was setting on a log in the woods near the pond. Nick held the log out over our pond while Mike took the photo with his cell. And isn't it an awesome photo?

I remember finding these little skinkers when I was a kid and trying to capture them... it always freaked me out when the tail came off and continued to move. Still kinda gives me the creeps. But I think they are a beautiful creature.

Mike left a lot of things on his-old/now-my phone when he gave it to me. Of all he left, this photo is one of the few that's fit to share!

     Dear Tony, Mickey, Chris, et al:
     Re: Texting Our Mike
     Ewww!!!!!! Gross. Stop.
     Regards,
     Julie
     p.s. Grow up!

And HEY! A Big Shout Out to my girl, Joycie, who did me a Major Solid this morning!
     I love you, Pumpkin!
     Thank you!!!!
     XOXOXO,
     Love,
     Yo Momma*

*way to cool to fool

Have You Ever Seen The Rain

The other morning on my way into work, the sky was ominous and beautiful. I took a photo with my cell phone...

And since I am feeling somewhat dark today, I wanted to use it as my desktop picture but I decided I didn't like the telephone pole and all the lines. Hey who needs fancy-schmancy Photoshop?! I played around with MS Paint and voilá!...


This morning is was pitch black dark out when I left the house for work... at 4:40am. Too damn early. Trying to get too much work done in too little time. Quarter close. Again.

Weird morning, too. Not much traffic on the road at that early hour. Surprisingly, I saw not even one semi-truck. That was odd. I did see 1 guy on a bicycle and 2 school buses. Also odd. Plus a couple of assholes who wouldn't turn their brights off. Not at all odd.

And as usual, I had a song stuck in my head. Actually just a small part of a song, because I can't remember all the lyrics to "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas"... only here's what I found myself singing in my head and humming out loud in the car this morning:
Oh, I want a hippopotamus for breakfast. Only a hippopotamus will do. Hmmm hmmm hmmm [can't remember anymore lyrics]...
Oh, I want a hippopotamus for breakfast. Only a hippopotamus will do. Hmmm hmmm hmmm...
Oh, I want a hippopotamus for breakfast. Only a hippopotamus will do. Hmmm hmmm hmmm...

Yes. For breakfast. Tapping my fingers on the steering wheel along with it. So... also odd.

A Very Odd Morning.

When I finally realized what I was singing in my head, I was like, what?!, jeez, who the hell are you/am I?... Turned on the radio to an oldies station and got me some CCR going. Got into the office and got me some coffee!

Why, hello there

Every once in a while, I like to look through Photo Friday. I like the Link Viewer they have, and I like zipping through the photos. I do this sometimes at work at my desk while I spend a quick 15 minutes eating my lunch, and it's a nice little break in the middle of a busy day. Especially when some of the photos are so spectacular, they can take one right out of one's dinky little cubicle for a brief second or two. Nice.

The range of photo quality, though, is truly amazing... from really great to really bad. A few years back, I used to participate, mostly as a means to try to learn how to use an Olympus that was my first real digital camera (I'm not counting my very old Sony Mavica). That Olympus had features on it that I never did get around to using. I think Photo Friday was booming then, this was early 2005... and it wasn't unusual to see over 600 photos posted for one weekly challenge. That's a lot of photos to look at, especially when we had only dial-up Internet access back then. I think now it mostly depends on the weekly challenge, some of them get a lot of interest, thus 900 photos, and some don't, so 120 photos. I find it all very interesting.

Mostly I enjoy Photo Friday just to find those few photos that really strike me for whatever reason. A photo I can't get out of my mind.

There's a lot of professionals or almost-professionals using it for basically free advertising, and eh, who cares. But they bore me. They bore me about as much as their polar opposites... the ones I see that are the half-assed photos of someone's little daughter, photos hardly in focus and barely able to be categorized as part of the week's challenge. Those all just make me bored. I mean, HELLO, it's Photo Friday, not show me your crappy quality photo you took AGAIN of your kid. And it's not all about you, Mr. $8,000-camera PLUS expensive lens selling photos and copyrighting everything because of money, money, money.

Photo Friday is about... well, here it is in their own words:

• Each week Photo Friday posts a photo assignment. Your mission is the creative interpretation of the week's theme. When you're done, post the picture you took to your website and submit your link to Photo Friday.


• Photo Friday is about challenging our participants to be original and creative within the constraints of the week's theme. It's not a competition. Anyone with a camera and a place on the internet to post pictures can participate.

I like the regular average Joes & Janes who take a great shot or set up a great shot for the challenge and post it. Those are the pics I look for.

Last week's challenge was "Extreme Closeup" and some of the photos were amazing. This one I just cannot get out of my head. I just like this little feller. He's my laptop's desktop background right now. Yes, I totally do that. If I find a photo I adore, I may use it for my desktop background. I mean, seriously, click on the photo and look at him large... how can you say no to those eyes?

I found one photo quite some time ago that was a black and white shot of a circle of dark stones on a beach, and there was just something about it that was awesome. But I can't locate it now, and so... I miss it. But not enough to go through a kazillion Photo Friday photos to try and find it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

OK, so... reminding myself of my penchant for copying the pics for using as my desktop background, I went to my old computer and found it!...



I sorely wish I could give credit to the photographer, but after finding the file and looking at the date of it, then spending a bit of time trying to find it again on Photo Friday, well... it seems an impossible task. If I find the photographer, I will totally update this post and give him credit (I seem to recall it was a him, and they were on vacation in Norway or Finland or something, and he lived in Switzerland or something, or I could possibly have dreamt all that up). Love the photo, though. Don't you? Do a Google image search on "beach circle" and you'll see some neat photos, but in my opinion, not as good as this one.

   UPDATE:
   I found the pic, "on the beach" on Photo Friday,
   in the "Best of 2007"... here's the link to it
   on the beach by urbanmonster
   Not the story I remember...
   But awesome photo.

This has been such a strange day. Good Friday, and a holiday by my company (whoo-hoo, thank God for those Christians, eh). But I did have to do a bit of work today, at least from home (been doing a LOT of that lately). Kev spent time outside stacking wood, and he came in the house to tell me there was a beautiful pair of Canada geese setting on the edge of our pond in the sun. So I grabbed Joycie's/my little Sony and snuck out there. It was pretty windy today, so I managed to get quite close to them.


Since I knew Kev was going to head out back with the 3 dogs shortly and would scare the pair away, I tried to get even closer. They got up and got agitated, and then got into the pond, like swimming kind of toward me. I taped it with the little Sony, but between my walking on uneven ground, the strong wind, my facing the sun, and the little Sony wiggling at every move, the movie file is awful (Joycie said like "The Blair Witch Project"... ugh!). I would walk a little closer toward them then stop, then walk, then stop... and at one point they really started squawking at me. Something caught my eye and I looked down at the edge of the pond and saw this:


Why would she lay an egg on the edge of the pond like that? Freaked me out. I stopped the taping, and right about then, the 2 geese took off from the pond... talk about a grand exit. It was gorgeous. And I wasn't recording any longer. Sweet.

So Kev and I, and the 3 dogs, took another 4-wheeler ride out back and retrieved the game camera. I convinced Kev to plant a fence post near the egg and set up the camera there... I wanna see what happens to it. When Kev was setting the metal fence post, Barney and Reilly were with us, getting into the pond. Reilly suddenly noticed the egg and started for it... Kev had to yell at him quick. Reilly thought it was a ball, and he surely had to get it before Barney! That would've been a let-down in so many ways.

Can't wait to see what the camera shows tomorrow. Full moon tonight, too. Very beautiful on the pond. And how do I know this? Because it is right now almost one o'clock a.m., A.M.! I am wide awake at 1am. This is not like me, and I'm not sure how this happened. I am the one trying to stay up until at least 8:30pm lately. Especially now, working so many extra hours on quarter close (work stuff, y'know). I'm pooped by 7pm. But today, I'm all wide awake. Well, wide awake for me. Tomorrow should be very interesting.

I must get some hair dye soon

So this past week, I've stated out loud several times that I cannot wait for springtime. Several times. This is not like me. I usually love winter, and I am never the person saying that I cannot wait until springtime.

In my now usual balance with the universe, we got over 6 inches of snow yesterday. Of course.

And, also in keeping with my current kinship with the universe, which is to say, I am the red-headed stepchild as far as good luck servings, I woke up this morning with a sore throat, chest congestion and a headache that just continued to build and build throughout the morning. I am not even 100% over the last 'flu yet, my ears still hurt, and now I'm sick all over again. Of course. This next week is a super busy one for me at work, with a lot of meetings, a lot of things to learn and a lot of deadlines. Of course.

My head feels too heavy for my body. Last week was difficult... I had some things I had to do that required composing... stringing words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs... but I felt like all creative spark in me had been snuffed out. The fires were not banked, they were stone cold. Sucked out. Leaving a big, puffy feeling in my head, like big, painful pillows between both ears.

I cannot wait until springtime. Sun. Warmth. I'm sick of winter, sick of snow and sick of coughing.

Waa, waa, waa!!! I am a whiny baby. With a runny nose.

So... because I still have no creative juices flowing whatsoever, I decided to whine and complain (so unlike me! ha!) and then show you some beautiful, beautiful photos that Joycie took with her little Sony camera last August, when it was warm and sunny and beautiful...











There, I feel a little better. Don't you?

A long post, just like make-up sex

So I haven't been posting much on my blog lately. I think it's not only because I'm so swamped at work and then so tired out when I'm home, that the little free time I seem to have at home, I end up doing work at home, and then my brain is too tired to feel creative at all... so writing a post, even logging onto my home computer seems like too much work... And I enjoy this blog, so then it's just more negativity in my life. And then it seems like just one more thing on my 'to do' list. And then I feel like I miss it. And then... well, ya get the picture.

So here's a long post for today, and I promise a joke at the end. A joke! At the end! So maybe not so much like make-up sex (I hope, for your sake).

My dear, dear Sony is currently sitting in my LaSabre at a garage while my car is getting repaired... we took it in for a $400 pump thingy and it's turned into a $2,000+ whatever thingy. Shit.

We dropped the car off yesterday afternoon late, and I was home before I realized my camera was still in it. I am missing my Sony. I take it with me everywhere I go, usually. Since I've had it since May of 2006, it's basically a really old fart of a digital camera now... and she's been through some rough times. I lost the button to push to take a photo over a year ago, and handily set up a paperclip to work instead. Works fine, and cheaper than what they wanted to repair it. But this past Saturday morning, while at Sammy's last football game of the season, I dropped my Sony. From the very top of the bleachers all the way down to the bottom underneath onto pavement. So now I'm missing the wheel to change selections and the push thingy for zoom. But the stem of the wheel thingy is still in place, and I can turn that, so that's ok. And another paperclip can be utilized to zoom in and out (I used a safety pin at the game).



Seriously, is that one helluva camera or what?! Still works great. I took a ton of photos at Sammy's game... here's our Big No. 68 on the team...





And in this one, he's the one nearly horizontal, next to No. 24 on top of some opponents dressed in blue.



Go Sammy! It was an awesome game. The team they played has remained undefeated for the past 3 years we've played them and all this season... until Saturday when our boys beat 'em. Whoo hoo.

After the game, Sam and Kev left for Ann Arbor to go to the U of M and State game. They had a blast. Kev wore his Michigan garb and Sammy his State, and they watched State win. I stayed home, alone because Joycie & Mike were with Mike's family at a wedding in Kalamazoo. So I made a cake for Sammy...



Then Sunday, Kathy called me on her way home from Mt. Pleasant, heading west on a rainy, stormy cloudy day, shot with sunshine here and there. She was fortunate to see one of the most outstanding rainbows she's ever seen, vibrant colors. Plus a triple rainbow, and then further west, the vibrant rainbow from end to end, the whole arc. I told her, see that's why I take my camera with me everywhere I go! And I ran outside into the cold wet grass and out by the pond, but no rainbows to behold at our house. It was pretty, though, and windy. Sunshine came through for a little bit.



And Reilly came out to greet me...



But I could almost hear him thinking, are ye daft, girl? it's freezing out here. Right you are, old boy. In we went.

Kev bought me a present this past week, as a sweet surprise. This is my new CO2 BB gun.



Works great and I can pop those chipmunks and squirrels in the butt and they know I mean business now. I love it.

And I have a funny story with Kev... the other evening we sat down to watch a recorded episode of CSI, it was Episode 2 of Season 9, and I was reading the description about it, how a girl jumps to her death from a tall building and lands on a bus... and I said something like, well, this sounds... and before I could finish, Kev says, "flattering?"...

Well, it cracked me up.

The other day, I had this e-mail conversation with a guy I work with... something else that made me laugh...
      ____________________________________________
      From: Julie
      To: JT
      JT & A. , I need to skip today's update meeting. Sorry for the short notice. I was out sick yesterday & Tuesday, and now have some urgent catching up to do.
      Thanks,
      Julie
      ____________________________________________
      From: JT
      To: Julie
      Hi Julie - I hope you're doing okay now. Was your dementia acting up again? Ugh :(
      Try not to press yourself, k?
      I know I have a ton of things to respond to you on; just have to unbury myself from qtr end & that transfer I did for ya.
      Talk to you soon
      ____________________________________________
      From: Julie
      To: JT
      Oh, JT, you just provided me with what will likely be my only laugh of the day!!!!!!
      I have vertigo, not dementia! Though maybe dementia ain't that far away in my future.............
      I think I had a stomach flu, combined with the still present vertigo. It was yukky.
      I owe you stuff, too. Maybe we can talk one day next week.
      Have a good day!!!
      Julie
      ____________________________________________
      From: JT
      To: Julie
      Y'know, as soon as I sent that reply, I knew it was wrong - duh!
      Hee-hee; glad you're better though :)
      You have a good day too!
      ____________________________________________
      From: Julie
      To: JT
      I wonder if I could retire early if I have dementia..........
      What were we talking about?
      Who are you, again?
      Where am I?
      ____________________________________________
      From: JT
      To: Julie
      Can you hear me now?


And now for the joke I promised:
A cabbie picks up a Nun. She gets into the cab, and notices that the VERY handsome cab driver won't stop staring at her. She asks him why he is staring. He replies: 'I have a question to ask you but I don't want to offend you.' She answers, 'My son, you cannot offend me. When you're as old as I am and have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I'm sure that there's nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive. ''Well, I've always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me.' She responds, 'Well, let's see what we can do about that: first, you have to be single and second, you must be Catholic.' The cab driver is very excited and says, 'Yes, I'm single and Catholic!' 'OK' the nun says. 'Pull into the next alley.' The nun fulfills his fantasy, with a kiss that would make a hooker blush, But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying. 'My dear child,' says the nun, 'why are you crying?' 'Forgive me but I've sinned. I lied and I must confess, I'm married and I'm Jewish. 'The nun says, 'That's OK. My name is Kevin and I'm going to a Halloween party.'

Another inspiration

Here's another interesting link from the Photo Friday 'Art' challenge... this one by "Pfluegl's photostream" on Flickr, & it's called "Kollage". Take a look; it's cool.

So I decided to play with .jpg files, & being inspired by "Kollage"... here's my Toad Collage:



And since I spent so much time fiddling around with a photo of a toad (a photo that Sammy took last August), I started doing some toad research on the 'net just for fun. I discovered the "toad-in-the-hole" fascination that reached a peak in Great Britain in the mid 1800's. Toad-in-the-hole is the supposition that a toad can live inside of a rock or tree or whatever for years... and that several were found, for example, by workman cutting limestone or sandstone. Here's a long, but interesting, article about it from Fortean Times UK. It's kinda freaky. But the article states that this toad discovery was still occurring as late as 1980. This toad-in-the-hole is also known as the Entombed Toad Phenomenon. This weirdness isn't limited to toads; it seems frogs are included also... and it may possibly be true. In any case, there's a ton of info on the 'net for it... Google hits for
     toad in the hole - about 145,000
     Entombed Toad Phenomenon - about 17,200
     frogs in stones - about 531,000
That'll keep ya busy, eh.

Also interesting, Toad in the Hole is a traditional British dish, pub game, and British pub located in California, of course (though I don't see "Toad in the Hole" on their menu).

If you follow the link to the dish (on Wikipedia) above, there's a link to the recipe. The instructions, or "method," given in the recipe ends with this:

     Race the dish to the table immediately
     it is taken from the oven, while it is
     puffy and crisp; cut out each sausage
     in a frame of batter.

Race, race! the dish... you can't make this stuff up, y'know...

Around the house...

I took a page out of my niece, Chelle Belle's, book, which is to say I'm copying her idea... and I decided to photograph some random things around our house. We've gotten a lot of snow lately, and some rain and freezing rain... winter weather. I'm stuck inside since it's not worth the risk of falling to take a walk outside. So, of course, that has made me want to be outside SO MUCH. I can't, so of course I really wanna go outside and take some photos of the beautiful snow-covered landscape. You know how that goes... can't or shouldn't, so really, really want to.

I liked how Chelle used close-ups, lighting and angles on the 4 posts she did of photos of things around her apartment. Since I can't photograph the snowscapes outside, I took photos of things around our house.

I drafted the previous post about wood smoke, and I thought I had published it... and I took some of these photos, below, abd then I finalized my choices of pictures to post while Kev and Sammy watched Survivor Thursday evening (thank goodness Johnny Fairplay is gone, now I can watch this season!)... but I'm just a little late in posting, and I'll explain why in my next post. For now, here's my around the home photos; things I photographed just because I liked the color or shape or for no discernable reason at all.

Green-eyed boy

Recently, Sammy expressed an interest in getting Photoshop, and since we have our new, fast Internet, he was looking around for it the other day. I was up in his bedroom working on his computer, tired and frustrated, when he arrived at the bedroom door to tell me that Photoshop software was something like a thousand bucks, but we could download a copy and use it for 30 days free, so could he please download it? He wasn’t too happy when he got a vehement “no” from me.

It took a while, but I finally figured out what he wanted. He just wanted to screw around with some photos of himself for his myspace page. I found a bunch of bitmap files of just an eyeball, and I made him explain them to me… he was trying to take a photo of himself and make it all black & white except for his eyes. Which is one reason why he wanted Photoshop. So I showed him the not-so-quick-&-easy, but free way to get that same effect. Actually, I’m not sure how to use Photoshop, so maybe my way is just as quick & easy. It didn’t take me long, probably less than 5 minutes. Here’s the end result, the photo how Sammy wanted it...



Pretty cool, huh. He’s quite creative. Here’s how I did it...

The original photo looked like this...



and I wanted to make it black and white, like this...



so I opened it using Microsoft Office Picture Manager (right click on photo file, select Open With & choose it), and I chose Edit Pictures, then selected Color (or you can go to the Picture menu & choose Color). I then changed the Saturation to -100, making the photo black & white.



I did a File Save As to save the black & white photo, retaining the original photo file as is. Sammy decided he wanted his eyes to show more green, which sometimes his eyes are super green, other times golden... they change depending on what he’s wearing and what the light is because he has those ever-changing hazel eyes. Lucky, gorgeous boy.

So anyway, I decided to really green up his eyes, and it didn’t matter that everything else became more green as well, because only his eyes would show...



I once again opened the original photo using Microsoft Office Picture Manager, then chose Edit Pictures and selected Color again, this time changing the Amount to something like 25 and the Hue to 130...



Again, File Save As for the green version. Then I opened both the black and white and the green version photo files in MS Paint. On the black and white, I wanted to erase his black and white irises, so to make that easier to do I first selected View, Zoom, Large Size, then I selected the erase tool and erased his irises... looks spooky, huh...



Then I took it back to normal size, View, Zoom, Normal Size, and without saving that file or doing anything else with it, I simply selected the entire photo (you know, CTRL+A, or Edit, Select All), copied it to clipboard (CTRL+C), then I went to the already open green version and pasted it on top of it (CTRL+V) – but it is important that Draw Opaque is not activated (Image, Draw Opaque should not have a checkmark next to it), and you get this...



Oh, and by the way, you can’t save the black and white photo with the eyes erased out of it and use it later to paste again... I don’t know why it doesn’t work that way, but it doesn’t, because the spot you have erased isn’t a hole in the photo any longer.

Now this would be very time-consuming if you were trying to do something more elaborate than a couple of little eyeballs, but for those of us who, a) don’t own Photoshop software or any other special photo editing software, and b) don’t have time to learn how to use it even if we had it, this is an easy way to get popping green eyes, eh?

And it made my boy happy. I believe his exact words were, “You rock, Mom!” I’ll take it. And I love looking at those green eyes... or...



or...



or...



or how 'bout this...



or...



OK, I'm done now. That was fun.

Hindsight

For most of our married life, whenever Kev and I have had to make a large purchase, such as a refrigerator or a microwave, we've always declined on purchasing the extended warranty. You see, extended warranties were not all that common when we first married over 24 years ago. I believe it started with purchasing a new car, then it spread. Suddenly, when you bought an appliance at Sears, they tried a hard-sell on Sears' extended warranty, over and above the manufacturer's warranty. I can't prove it, but it also seems like the manufacturers' warranties were better and longer back then. Anyway, back in those early days of extended warranties it was generally felt, in the circle of our family and friends, and likely the majority of Americans, that purchasing an extended warranty was a scam, a rip-off.

It's taken me a while to get clued in, but now I buy 'em. Whenever I purchase anything at Best Buy that has an extended warranty option, I now buy it. This is a new thing for me for 2007... I wish I had started in 2006...

I was so happy back in May of 2006 when I got my new Sony. I have taken thousands and thousands of photos with it. Love it. But then at my niece's wedding, it broke... the shutter button stem broke, so the button flew off along with the little spring. I lost the spring.

I tried a few things to jury-rig the camera into working, including a semi-straightened out large paperclip, which worked pretty well, but it kept falling off. I tried a push pin, but I needed a spring to really make it work. I could find no spring of the right size, despite disassembling several old ink pens. Then one day I was taking a label off from something, and it had that gummy glue on it... you know, the kind that makes you think of snot. And the proverbial lightbulb went off in my head. So I finally devised this plan...



The gummy stuff cushions the push pin and keeps the pin from constantly hitting the shutter trigger, and a little tape keeps the cushioned pin in place. Voilà! That got me through a few weeks, including Sammy's birthday. But now I'm using Joycie's little Sony...



Which is a nice, little camera, but oh, man! I miss my Sony. I dearly wish I had bought the extended warranty. *sigh* I have dropped my Sony off at a local camera shop, where they have a repair guy come in once a week to pick up cameras to be fixed and drop off those he's fixed. The good news is that my camera isn't shipped away for repair, so hopefully I will have it back in a couple of weeks. In time for Thanksgiving and Joycie's birthday... I hope.