Daily Archives: Friday, January 14, 2005

Showing My Desktop

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This should be “Show Me Your Desk” but is instead: Showing My Desktop!

Found through: Tulip Girl and Karen: Life with 4 Kids and a Dog and Donna: Quiet Life.

Showing: My Desktop :)

I have a digital camera, but my “desk” setup is chaos right now. I have my geriatric laptop stuck on the same shelf of our older entertainment armoire as my two of my sound system components. It’s a cramped spot. Done since the cold of Winter chased me from the kitchen as I’d been setup on a table, to the dining area where I am now, which is next to the fireplace. The cold relented, but I’ve stayed.

I don’t have a real desk. I have a smaller kitchen table that I had been using. I had been using a larger one than that, but DH took THAT table for HIS desk when he started working out of the house, and so I was stuck with the smaller one, and it doesn’t house my stuff well. It gets junked up FAST so it was a relief to move to the dining rooms cramped spot.

In any case, it’s howI work. I move my stuff around all the time, if I can. Keeps me happier to re-orient, not really re-organizing :wink:

If my laptop was NOT geriactric I would be anywhere with IT. But in July, a year and a half go, dear children 2 and 3 tried to kill it with a Coke. They did well killing the keyboard and more, so I’m now using it with a “wireless keyboard and mouse” and it’s opened, and on lifesupport all the time therefore. It works alright, just is a glorified laptop, really a slim desktop now. :(

So there is NO picture of the spot I have been sitting at the last several days … too small and crunched in there to get a nice picture of my messyness. :)

For those without a digital camera, you can do this too. Just put on your monitor what you want to be shown, and press the “PrtScn” button [Print Screen].

This puts the image on the copy clipboard. Open an imaging program, such as Photoshop Elements, or whatever it is you have on your computer, and do what you need to do to paste the image.

For instance, in Photoshop Elements, or Photoshop: Open the program, then click the “New” button for a new image, or press CTRL+N on your keyboard for the same thing, or else go to “FILE, New …”

The new image layer options will be there, they should have the correct size of your desktop resolution, click OK. Then go to “Edit, Paste”. The image should paste into the empty image layer which you started.

To save for the web, change the resolution to 72ppi, and save it to a smaller size to display on your webpage.

I use the “Save for web …” feature in Photoshop Elements for it’s ease.

Just click that and choose the settings. Medium quality is alright for a photo, and I use 600px wide. Make sure to save your file as a JPG or JPGE.

Name your file, save it, and then upload to your site the normal way you upload files and photos.

If you don’t have an “easy to web” setup, just play with your image program until you can get the file small enough for your web page.

New Eggs

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I checked the hens this mid-morning, and they hadn’t laid anything.

It’s 2:45pm and I just got back from checking, as I walked up to the A-Frame I saw that Hawklady was down on the ground.

“Good,” I thought to myself, “she must have laid an egg.”

Surprise, surprise, when I opened the nest loft door, there was an egg, Hawklady jumped up to say “Hi!”, and my eyes blurred and freaked trying to see that green egg. I had trouble, since being visual I was expecting a certain colored egg, and my eyes couldn’t parse the lack of green on the egg. It was pale, not green, not white, not brown.

So I picked it up and it’s a very pale brown egg. Smallish. I then looked at all the hens. It must have been from an Australorp, being that pale brown. One of them before seems to have laid lighter eggs than the others. Anyhow, the Wyandotte eggs were always darker than the Australorps, and this was a very pale brown egg.

None of the Australorps, save one, had what I’d call “combs and wattles” that showed “red enough to be ready to lay”. One sort of did, but not really. The Wyandottes looked just as “not ready” as the Australorps. I’ll go back out and see if I can get my hands on that one Australorp and see if she’s submissive.

I then went to the SuperYard pen and peeked into the box, and sure enough, a nice skinny longish white egg. Just like day before yesterday. :)

So we have one Every-Other-Day-White-Leghorn layer, and a One-Time-Thus-Far-Hawklady-Green layer, and a One-Time-Maybe-Every-Day-or-Every-other-day-the-future-will-tell layer — probably an Australorp.

Both eggs were chilly. So they were probably laid not long after my mid-morning check. Figures. :wink: It’s a nice day, supposed to be in the mid-50′s, so out and about it’s nice in the sun, but in the shadows, as the nest boxes are, it’s chillier than not. Tonight it should be down in the 30′s, frosty if not freezy. That’s not so bad, since it was in the lower 40′s this morning, and the hens did lay. It’s the following days, when it’ll get into the 20′s that I’m more concerned about the hens not liking and stop laying.

In any case, it could be that the light is noticeably increasing to them, and they don’t mind laying. The darkest day of the year is past, and maybe they’ll just hang in there and lay some now, no big pattern, then get really going for Spring. Sounds good to me, but then, I’m not the one laying the eggs and living out back. :smile:

Strider by Maisy

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I am artistic, but not an “artist” by any means. I am not “naturally good with any artistic mediums to create”. I do mean “art” here, as in drawing, painting, etc.

I have a natural talent for being ABLE to do things. I have “my own way” of doing such things. I haven’t been trained. I can train myself to a degree of success, as far as I am desiring to do so.

So last week I saw some things on a craft show on HGTV, some crafting show that highlights 3 different people in the US, and that person “makes their thing” for the camera. Some lady did something with making a cat for some purpose.

I had be thinking of drawing for many months. I am a doodler, a doodler of shapes and squiggly odd things.

So that TV show coupled with my “thinking about it” the previous months prompted me to get out a piece of paper, pencil, and eraser. I created, scanned and printed, then colored that scanned/printed page with gel pens to create THIS:

Strider by Maisy
Strider by Maisy, January 2005

By no means meant to represent actual reality, this is an artsy crafty thing. I just “did it” and it took very little effort. I am very pleased with the outcome, but know it pleases me since I made it and I have no training and know that it’s a good result for the ability I put into it.

It’s just a little test for myself to prove that I do have something I can shape if I just put myself to the task.

My tastes in art have been with Monet, and other Impressionists, as well as older portrait painters [I wrote about some in a post recently connected to a quiz about "who would paint you?"]. And I like arts and craft type things with animals. I like Warren Kimble, for instance, and other such things.

So there is my tribute to the craft of arsty drawing something near and dear. I need better tools, and meanwhile I’ll do some more and see what I can do. I am not interested in doing computer art. I work with photos and create graphics and such in Photoshop Elements.

I am precisely talking about manually drawing on paper and using physical mediums like that and paint, pencils, etc.

I am all for scanning things in. As I did scan in my basic drawing that’s above, then printed it and used THAT copy to finish the drawing and colorize it. I also scanned the finished product. Duh, most obvious, hay? :wink:

See now, this is something moreso new to me. I’ve not put anything I’ve ever drawn up on this or anyother site. I have no category of “art” or “drawing” or “crafting” or such to put this post in. So it’s an EVENT primarily. :smile:

Categoricalness can be defined later if there is a need for it. Otherwise, it’s just an event, a flick in the wind, something I did then moved on to something else. I fear, not really “fear”–it’s just an expression, that my comfort with the above drawing will lead me past betterment. So I am posting this to motivate myself a bit, hopefully! :veryshocked: