Golden

Sunset from the hill. Somewhere in Ohio. Somewhere close to my house, but on a hill where you can actually see the western sky and not your neighbor's house. The park was full of ball players, walkers, cyclists, cars and squirrels. No dogs. No pets allowed.

The Easter holiday stretches out before me. Almost every day is filled up with socializing of one sort or another. My daughter said she does not want to go anywhere or do anything. She is depressed with not being able to see her beau. She did speak to him on the telephone last evening.

I do have most of Saturday free so that I can make my part of Easter dinner. We travel about twenty miles to one of my sibling's houses this year. Not very far.

I remember Sunrise Service when I was young. We would get breakfast in the basement of the church afterwards. One of those little boxes of cereal and half a banana. Some years I would have a new Easter dress. I remember two favorites. One pink and one yellow. My older sister would polish me up until I was shining. I wasn't allowed to wear the dress anywhere but to church. Only once to school for picture day. It was such a special feeling. It was also kind of silly. Somebody paid good money for that dress and I only wore it a few times.

After church we returned home to hunt for our Easter baskets. Once mine was in the oven (not an easy task for Easter day - not sure how the bunny pulled that one off). Another time it was in the clothes dryer. Once my brother's was hanging from the ceiling in the place of a plant. That was funny.

We would have so many colored eggs that we couldn't eat them all. Oh, and back then we didn't know you were supposed to refrigerate dyed eggs. Ours sat out in the basket for weeks at a time and we still ate them. (That might explain a lot).

One time my brother, myself and a bunch of neighborhood kids played ball with a bunch of eggs. What a waste. I just remember pieces of hard boiled eggs flying all over the neighbor's yard. Somebody would pitch an egg to the batter and they would swing and "egg explosion". Wow. I am so glad we didn't think of that with the extra tomatoes we had in our garden in September. Most of them rotted on the vine and my brother and his friends would enjoy throwing them at me and my girl friends. Nasty boys!

It looks as though we get another seventy-some degree day today in Ohio. I think the rain sets in this evening or tomorrow. My daughter did rake the yard (YAY!) into about three piles of pine tree twigs and the neighbor (the one whose tree did the depositing) told us we can just throw it onto his burning pile. They will have a bonfire every other Saturday night during the summer months.

Time to get outside and get moving. I have had the windows open in the house for the past two days airing out the stuffiness. The cats have been killing each other for window post seating. They have to get a running jump for the bathroom window. I laughed because I expect one day they will overshoot and the screen will give way. Or maybe that is just wishful thinking. No, not really. We are one story so they wouldn't have far to fall and I would have to go outside chasing them. I can't let one of my babies out there in the wild with strange dogs, cats, squirrels and teenagers racing their cars up and down the roadways.

Wow. I am impressed. Spellchecker only stopped on the word YAY. I must be awake. Of course, if I ran it again it would stop on the word Spellchecker. Yep, it wants to change it to splices. I see why. Spell checker is two words, Peruby. Two separate words!

Pink jag

Hey - wait! The baby was a boy so I should be posting in blue. Oh, darn. He was born at 12:45 a.m. today. Another April birthday.

I am so darn tired tonight. I have postponed the hospital visit until tomorrow when my sister can be there. I have heard that baby and parents and grandparents are all doing fine. Relief. Apgar of 9.9 (which tells me either there weren't too many drugs involved or this is the second reading). Hey I just Googled the word Apgar and found out it is an acronym for Activity, Pulse, Grimace, Appearance, Respiration. Named after Virginia Apgar in 1952.

Okay, I don't think I want to know what they do to get the poor baby to grimace. I know what I do to get a grimace.

1. Think about my daughter and her boyfriend.
2. Think about the mess my pets are making or have made.
3. Think about a staff meeting.
4. Think about the rising prices of gasoline.
5. Think about how hard it is getting to post anything on this blog anymore.

There are more, but I am just too tired to think.

Network topic for today: Before you e-mail friends and family pictures be sure to resize the file so that it does not exceed the mailbox limit. A quick and nifty re-size program I use is called Irfanview. Free, dependable, easy to use. Lots of features for a free package.

Waiting...

I am waiting to become a Great Aunt for the second time. The doctor sent the expectant Mom to the hospital at 3:30 p.m. My nephew and my sister are on pins and needles waiting. This is my oldest sister's first grandchild. It will be a boy. They already know.

Mom also has a son from a previous relationship. He is nine. I am so excited.

I work tomorrow and then I can go to the hospital and visit!

Above picture is a forsythia bush from my Park adventure yesterday. Blooming beautifully!

Network term for today: DCOM - Distributed Component Object Module. Possible buffer overflow that could allow a worm to attack a network resulting in a denial of service attack.

Sunset through the trees

I took an hour this evening and went to the hill at the top of our town park. Most of the shots were taken through some huge but beautiful pine trees. I didn't mind. Although I felt like I had camera bulb flash or welders flash in my eyes. When I looked away out across the grassy park after taking the photos everything looked foggy. I thought 'Wow, what a day for picture taking'. And then I realized it was not that way really, it was my eyes.

Stress in the teenagers life. Her boyfriend got in trouble and she can't see him for a week, maybe longer. That is their entire spring break. I feel bad, but I won't have to worry about her sneaking him into the house while I am at work.

We are melancholy tonight. I just spoke with his Mom. Tough lessons, tough teenage life.

Today's network topic: smurfable. Many networks are understaffed and poorly managed. They are still quite "smurfable." See, I can talk about work without mentioning work.

I should be cleaning

You can read all the books you want on how to tweak your digital photos, but I have more fun experimenting on my own. I found this feature in Photoshop's Filter, Blur, Twirl and just can't stop. Below is the original photo.

giggle, giggle.

Radial

And with her tummy full of popcorn chicken from KFC, the happy (now) 15 year old fell asleep playing her new video game Kingdom Hearts II. Mom sighed and began to clean up the carved ice cream cake. She neglected to get a picture of it before everyone tore into it. Ah, well. Maybe later. Into the freezer for now.

Outside Mom found the sun shining, the birds chirping. The yard is going to need some serious care this week. The neighbor's huge pine tree has deposited so much debris this spring. The daughter is off all week for spring break. Think there is any chance of getting her to work off that extra $30 she ran up on the cell phone bill buying tokens for her PC game online? Maybe.

cans

Photo Friday Challenge - Organized.

This one time

at the video store I brought my daughter along. She was a toddler, just learning to walk. She got away from me and ran into this back room that had the swinging doors like a saloon. I reached down and grabbed her up in my arms while she giggled away.

I cast a sidelong glance around the small room. Porn, porn everywhere. Was my face red as I carried her out of the back room!

I got clouds

I have plenty of cloud pictures to post. I'll grow weary of it soon, so bear with me. I am taking my camera today. I have no idea what the weather is going to be like. We haven't turned our television on in days other than to watch the movie Spirit.

The wind was pretty chilly when I let the dog out this morning.

I think today is going to be an easy day. Yesterday was pretty rough. I think I have the problem solved. Time will tell. A local network was being attacked. Not like a terrorist attack but by a packet storm. It appears to me as if it were internal.

A packet storm is when a machine or a group of machines flood the network with packets of data that will eat up the bandwidth and render a network useless. End users could go nowhere and do nothing because there was no bandwidth left for them.

A couple of technicians along with myself attempted to determine that source of this culprit machine. Hah! Can you say spoofing? We were chasing phantoms.

Here is what I did that I believe will resolve the issue.

Reach for the sky

Another sky picture from my drive on Monday. I increased the hue and contrast to get that pretty blue sky.

I am headed off to another location tomorrow. My camera battery is charged! Woot!

Post, post, post, post, post.

I'm gonna post and post and post my pictures. The skies were awesome in Ohio yesterday. I almost did not take my camera on my travels. I am so glad I did. I am touching them up just a tiny amount with the hue and contrast features. I also added the lens flare to the cloud one the other day. It looks as if I were in an airplane taking that one.

Above is a back road somewhere in rural Coshocton county, I think. It was a delightful drive.

My picture posting problem happened sometime between 7:30 a.m. Friday morning and 7:30 Saturday morning. I am trying to narrow it down to see if I had changed anything in my Mozilla to do this. I can't recall anything.

I had one of the best times Saturday night I have had in a long time. Other than the cigarette smoke which makes me sick. I laughed so hard, too. Both created a splitting headache. I did have migraine medicine with me and within an hour the splitting ache was gone. We played Euchre, which I was a bit rusty at but held my own.

Somebody had brought watermelon pucker Schnapps and mixed it with vodka and 7-up Plus. I had two of them (long before I took my medication) and I ate afterwards. They were very good. I finished the evening up with Ginger ale. What else?

Can you believe this 7-up product? Fortified with calcium and vitamin C? The only thing is the Splenda which my have contributed to my headache. I never could use Nutra-Sweet, either. It was all the rage back in the 80's - to drink diet pop. I finally figured out where my headache a day was coming from and cut out the diet soda.

The Cloud Maker

Whew! Got it. Advanced Java Script Options. (Allow scripts to change images). Take that!

Whatever. The above is a smokestack from the city I visited today. We nicknamed it the Cloudmaker.

Deselect Blogger Image Gracefully

Wah! I thought for sure my problem would be fixed today. My page source reads the same as everybody else's, now. I didn't change anything in the header.

I guess I'll have to dig deeper. It does read in the photo html post:

"parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully" as if I am posting porn or something. Maybe I have hit my 300MB image posting limit.

Oh, the picture above (if I can sneak around and tweak this post so that it shows up) is from my drive today. I had a myriad of cloudy skies to see today.

My pics will post without incident in IE, just having problems in Mozilla. Sigh.

Edit: Advanced Java Script Options. (Allow scripts to change images).

Yuk, yuk, yuk

What is Atom API and why does every other blog source code refer to it but mine? Still working on my "posting images" problem and I began to view other bloggers source code. Everyone that I have viewed (from blogger.com) has this in their header:

link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title=

but mine. :(

I hope it isn't one of those alphabetical things. My blog page being in the W's. It's like school all over again. Go to the end of the line. You're last.

In Blogger Status Issues I was reading about the Atom API. It doesn't help when the "more information" page goes nowhere. Dead links. Ppphhhttt!

Alright! That's it! My cat just threw up for the second time this morning! Puking cats, broken links, Atom API (whatever the hell that is) - I'm losin' it!

Challenge

This is the back alley behind my house. I am about the only one who uses it. There is an elderly lady behind me, but I have only seen her drive twice in the four years I have been here. All the other houses around me have front exits to the street. My garage is in the back of my house, so I pretty much get this alley to myself. Unless somebody is lost or coming to visit me.

I have a little challenge. My pictures are not posting in Firefox (unless I remove the not-a-real-namespace that I mentioned a couple of posts ago). However, they will post normally with MS Internet Explorer. I normally use Firefox. My site meter rainbow cube isn't showing in either browser.

What little time I had to read up on this has mentioned Norton Anti-virus being a suspect. So, this post is a test of sorts.

Edit: 10:30 p.m

Well, I had a little bit of time tonight to look at things. I was able to get my rainbow cube to re-appear from sitemeter (I also lost it on my personal web page). It was showing up in IE. It has something to do with javascript and onblur. I recall trying some javascripting months ago on my blog site, but can't recall what I was trying to do. I must have left something in there and something somewhere got updated and it threw things out of whack on my pages. But, only in Mozilla Firefox. I'll continue to chip away at it. In the meantime, I have to be sneaky to get my photos to post. Sigh.

Edit Edit: Advanced Java Script Options. (Allow scripts to change images).

They should be sleeping

I came home to find my daughter home, but her friend was no where in sight. I took my dog out for a break thinking about what to do when the girl's mother drove up to my driveway. I finally got my daughter to give us a name of a boy (twenty year old) that was with her 15 year-old friend. After calling and waking four families with the same last name as the boy, the girl walked into my back door.

Her Mother took her home.

I told my daughter I didn't want to see that "friend" at our house again.

What? Not a real name!

My photo wouldn't post until I editited Html and removed the "not a real name" nonsense from the code. What's up with that?

If you are trying to post and this is happening, choose the Edit Html tab at the top of your post window.

Remove the following section from the code:

("src="http://not-a-real-namespace/")

Click Publish Post and you should be okay. Good luck!

Edit: Advanced Java Script Options. (Allow scripts to change images).

Under the lilacs

I can't wait for these babies to bloom! I love lilacs. For fragrance, I put them right up there with my moonflowers.

My world has been a little crazy the past few days. The teenager and the pets are all still here and all have their chaos going on around me. Tonight I am taking a break from all of them and getting out. Looking forward to that.

I have been up for two hours and do not have anything accomplished other than reading the newspaper. I got caught up in the releasing of the 911 recordings of the WTC tragedy. A very sad read. All my gifts are wrapped for tonight's party, so I am ahead of the game. I have to make the food fixings, but that should be easy enough. I don't have my taxes done. I supposed I can work on them. I did them myself last year, and I think I will do a repeat this year. Not a lot of complications going on in that area.

My daughter turns 15 on the 7th. I have been looking into the whale watching tours on the Northeast coast. I have looked at New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine and New Brunswick areas. I am a bit concerned about seasickness. I read where one tour hands out tootsie roll pops to ease the queasiness. I am also interested in the dolphins and other sea life. I don't want to drive, she doesn't want to fly and she also turned up her nose at a train ride. Maybe I should wait until she gets her drivers license. I love to drive, it's just that I normally do a lot of it on the job and a vacation is getting away from the job.

Life on the spin cycle

Ack! The drama of a fifteen year-old breaking up with her boyfriend. It reminds me of the spin cycle on the washing machine when the load is unbalanced. This break-up is taking daze, err...days.

Still Scruffy

I still think a better name for her is Scruffy. She likes to sleep in a cubby hole just off the basement steps. It is where I kept the two pet carriers. Minus one. Maybe she figures if she sleeps in the place that belonged to the other pet carrier, I couldn't put her back into it. I saw she was sleeping there on the hard wood, took pity on her and gave her an old throw blanket I had in the basement.

Her eyes are NOT two different colors. It is just the way the camera picked it up.

My daughter called me crying today. She was trying to break up with her boyfriend. I came home an hour later to find that they had made up. Great. I thought that maybe things were improving. I want her to move on. Not today.

I went to the grocery store. I stood in line at the deli wanting some turkey breast for sandwiches. It was my first purchase. One deli worker was at the other end of the deli serving hot food to a customer. It appeared to me as if the other deli worker was having problems with his girlfriend. I could see her standing in the doorway talking to somebody. Another employee of the grocery store came up and I heard him ask the one deli worker where her help was. She yanked her head towards the door where the one stood talking to his now very upset girlfriend.

Then the deli worker served the other employee. That was enough for me. I walked out of the store without purchasing a thing. I had waited about ten minutes. Not even an acknowledgement from anyone saying that they saw me and would be with me shortly. Nobody yelling to the errant deli worker to get his butt back to work. Hey, maybe it was a girl deli worker. I didn't actually see the person behind the door....

And since I was early getting back home, I caught my daughter's boyfriend in the house when I wasn't home. (I had chased him out of the house when I left). They were eating bagels. My daughter said "I was feeding him. He was hungry."

I went up to his face and I said "Maybe I am not getting through to my daughter, but I am going to tell you that you are NOT to be in my house when I am not home. If I catch you in my house again when I am not at home, you will never see her (and I pointed to my daughter) AGAIN! Got it?!"

He mumbled "Yeah" and hi-tailed it out the door. Hey - I didn't get my turkey breast. If I ain't happy - ain't nobody happy!

Driving off into the sunset

I gave my daughter her first driving practice last evening. I enjoyed the beautiful shots of a sunset where she practiced.

Unmade bed

Mmm-hmmm. Yep. This is what happens when Peruby gets too lazy and doesn't make up her bed on a Sunday morning. She gets a cup of coffee, reads the paper, turns around and there he is. Stretched out, comfortable as can be. No worries. While I try to work around him sorting all my bills and paperwork, he dreams of where his next meal is coming from.

After months of asking my daughter what interests she and I both share that we can merge into a vacation of sorts, I finally have one. She no longer likes the beach and ocean because of her mole removal episodes. She turns up her nose at the thought of museums and Disney World. She mentioned that her latest interest is whales. Okay. I like that. How about a whale watching tour?

The information research has begun.

Pinky

Some pink. Sounds like "some pig" as in Charlotte's Web. Hey, that reminds me. Aren't they making a movie of that show? Yep. I just checked imdb.com. Stellar cast there.

I really diffused the above photo. The original was blurry anyway. I used my daughter's camera on some of the first arrangements and my hand was very unsteady. They are all gone now, so all I have are their pictures. I still have plenty of stuff to make more. I am working on one for myself that has an off-white watering pail with light green grapes on it. I set it outside for two years to get a weathered look to it. A little rust and such. Now I will begin to make it to suit me.

My sister told me that I did one for her a couple of years ago. A watering pail with grapes. I have no recollection of that. I should have taken a picture.

I took my daughter to get her hair cut this morning. She was hesitant for two reasons. She is in competition with her previous best friend from first through fifth grade for the longest hair in the class and her dyed tips would go when they cut it. I explained to her how her hair just won't grow if she doesn't get a bit cut off. The ends would just keep splitting apart and the hair becomes frayed. We will re-dye the tips another time. Her hair gets darker every year. Usually it lightens up in the summer, but she is sour with sunshine these days. (Because of the scars from her mole removals). She said she hates the color yellow. Everything yellow is evil.

I have four birthdays in the next couple of weeks. I tried to find some things today for gifts, but all I could find was stuff for myself. Grin. I did get a little done for others, but basically bombed out. Another time perhaps. I can't wait too long. My daughter let me know some of the stuff she wants for her b'day. We goofed off today. I dug up the old mini tape recorder and she likes to record people and then replay the sound in fast motion. We sounded like the chipmunks.

Blue wine glass

You could figure that it wouldn't be long before I was back to posting blue photos. I am playing with the scanner images again. I grabbed one of my wine glasses. This one is from Hardee's Christmas collection. It kept trying to roll off of the glass on the scanner, so I held it with my daughter's black bean wrist support. Worked like a charm. And I used the blue omni lighting effect on it.

I tried to grab Jasper and scan him, but he was having nothing to do with that. I couldn't catch Moose so I could look at her stitches, either. She tried so hard to get away from me that I was afraid I was going to hurt her, so I let her go. She is really scared of me now. I can add Jasper to that list, too. Maybe the bird? No, better not.

I try not to blog about my co-workers very much, but fact is stranger than fiction. This is the fact, plain and simple. My co-worker blew her nose, and said "Peruby, snot came out of my nose." And she proceeded to call her boyfriend and tell him. For some background information, she has been sick with sinus problems for months. But why did she think in all that is Holy, anybody would want to know besides a doctor of medicine?

My big baby - Casper.

My daughter named him. He was our first pet after our bird. I am not entirely sure why she named him Casper. It wasn't close to Halloween, but it could be that he reminded her of the holiday. He is all black. He found us. We would put him back out at night and he always came back. After about a week, he brought the black and white cat, Jasper. I figured they were litter mates (brothers). After taking them to the vet's office we found out that Casper had already been neutered and Jasper had not. Maybe they weren't from the same litter. Either way, they are similar to the cats I grew up with. Black and white short hair.

I am hoping to get some serious R and R this week-end. My stress level has been off the charts for the past week. My plate has been very, very full. I mentioned the baby shower and training in Columbus, but there was more. I won't go into detail, but I am really looking forward to doing nothing this week-end.

I will plan my daughter's birthday that is coming up fast. She will be 15. She said she doesn't want a party. Last year we had Brad Pitt on her cake. Well, a picture of him. He won't be gracing any food this year. Not sure who she is smitten with these days. She and her beau have passed the 10 month marker. Not as much drama as we used to have. Thank goodness.

The newest feline addition (Moose) has been coming upstairs. She is still very nervous around me. I am the one who has to grab her and push her into the pet carrier. Just one more time, dear little Moose. Just to get your stitches out. Before the spaying she was getting very loving and close to us. I notice that she seems to be sore going up and down the steps. I will take a look at her stomach if I can catch her. Just to make sure. She is cleaning herself up very nicely. I guess I can't call her Scruffy any more. See, I told you I was used to short hair cats. Sleek and smooth.

I am backed up on movies. My nephew has brought me about fifteen to watch. I doubt that I will. Most are ones I never heard of (Silver Hawk, In Good Company, Kingdom of Heaven) or don't care to see. (Saw). Two I do want to see. Coach Carter and Wedding Crashers. And of course there are the ones at the video store waiting to be rented. I looked today. Nothing caught my eye. The way I feel right now, I probably won't make it through many of them without falling asleep.

Migraines ran rampant this past week, but the medicine kept them in check. If not, I probably would have spent hours in bed sick as a dog. Any little change in my schedule will flip me out. Especially when my sleep cycle is thrown out of whack. And, it was. I think I put in nine hours last night. That is extremely rare for me.It's off to another early night for me again. Z-Z-Z-Z.

A Diaper Cake

diaper cake

I can't begin to think of how long this would take to make. It is called a "diaper cake". I count at least twelve rolled baby diapers in the front. The bottom is all baby diapers. The second and third layers are receiving blankets or burping cloths. There were two of these at the baby shower. They were huge! Like a wedding cake huge. My sister and her daughter said they didn't take that long to make. Okay.

I just spent two days in Columbus at a training session. I left my house at 5:00 a.m. yesterday morning and returned home about an hour ago. I don't think I have slept more than four hours in the past two nights, so I am really brain dead.

After about two hours on the road I was trying to call my daughter to make sure she was ready for school. The home phone kept ringing busy and she didn't answer her cell phone. I kept trying. Finally I reached her on the cell phone. She said that the upstairs phone said one extension was in use. She had been alone since 5:00 a.m. and it was almost seven. It was the downstairs phone. That was strange. She hung the receiver up, I told her to have a nice day and we hung up.

At some point and time during the training I began thinking about the scary movie where the baby sitter is alone in the house and the phone calls were coming from inside the house. Okay, remember - not much sleep. My imagination began to run wild. What if there had been somebody in the basement downstairs? I didn't even think about my dog. There is no way a stranger (or somebody we knew) could be in the basement without our dog telling on them. I wasn't thinking straight. I was on pins and needles until I was able to escape from my training and call her cell phone at 4:45. She was fine. Big breath.

Anyway the training was about 40 people. There were three females in the bunch. It was a security seminar by Microsoft. The first day was long and a bunch of us were having trouble staying awake. After a night in the motel room and very little sleep, I was really tired the second day (today). The software kept failing on the poor guy. Isn't that ironic? Microsoft's own software to fail during a training session? Imagine that!

Green circles

green eyes


This one is just weird. It is how I feel today. And very tired.

Beautiful Blue

As I have mentioned before I come from a family of eight. I am the youngest. When I was twelve years old I became an aunt for the first time. It wasn't long before I was an aunt of eleven. I had one of my own in 1991. Then the dry spell hit. In October we finally welcomed a new addition to the family. A little girl. Now, we have a little baby boy coming. He is due the end of April. We had his shower today. One sister who is usually out of the area was finally able to attend this family get together. A very rare occasion.

We had beaucoup blue. My sister chose the games from a list I gave her. She wanted simple ones like word scramble and match the baby animal with the Mommy animal. She wanted to keep things moving because we had out of state guests who had to hit the road. Then everyone ate. We had meat and cheese plates, vegetable trays, pasta salad, cookies and cake. I served two different kinds of punch. The pineapple one and my old stand-by Hawaiian red punch and ginger ale. The ice ring melted beautifully.

I'm not sure I mentioned the ice rings I make. I take a bundt cake pan and put a little ginger ale in the bottom. I take baby items that can get wet (such as teething rings, plastic key toys, rattles, etc...) and lay them in the ginger ale. I freeze it overnight. The next day, I add more ginger ale and more baby stuff and freeze again. I do this in layers because if you do it all at once the baby items all float to the top of the ice ring. When you are ready to put the ice ring into the punch bowl, sit it in warm water to loosen it and carefully take it out and float it into the punch. This can get kind of tricky without splashing punch all over the place.


I had to travel with this ring today, so I wrapped it in heavy duty foil and placed it in a large cooler. It was still frozen solid an hour later when I arrived at the hall.

We had a blast. There were so many people that had not seen each other in years, that some groups of people were kind of in their own little world. I can understand that. It was a beautiful event and the Mom and Dad-to-be were blessed with a huge amount of gifts. The Mom has one boy already who will be nine. He was not forgotten and received some presents of his own. I chased him around the hall with my little grand niece teasing him that he needed to practice holding a baby. They laughed and said he wouldn't touch her because she was a little girl. I then told him she had cooties and I chased him with her trying to touch him.

We gave him all the extra balloons. I thought for sure he was going to float away when he took them outside, but MythBusters has proven that isn't likely to happen. Supposedly it took 5000 helium-filled balloons to lift actor Paul Newman off the ground.

I think it was Melanie from Gone With the Wind who said "The happiest days are when babies come."

Dragging

I am dragging tonight. I just finished printing out all of the game sheets for the baby shower tomorrow. My brain is fried. I am running on auto-pilot.

Another kick in the ole pocketbook

So, I got this stray female cat. It is long hair. I want to do the right thing and have it fixed. I take it to my vet's office. I leave her overnight. I pick her up today. The vet smiled at me and said "She was already fixed, that will be $85.00."

'Couldn't you tell she was fixed before?'

"No, they are harder than the males to tell. When I opened her up and saw just the stub of the uterus, I knew she had already been spayed."

I paid and left. What can you do? Ask for a discount? She performed the procedure. There was just nothing to take out.

Here is what I want to know. Why couldn't she just say to me when I walked in the door, "Here is your cat. She is all set to go. She will never have kittens. She did fine. Bring her back in ten days to get the stitches out. That will be $85.00."

Why? Why couldn't she just say that to me? She wouldn't be lying. I wouldn't feel like I had been duped.


Edit: I found the link to the scanner pictures I posted yesterday:

http://lenscape.my-expressions.com/about.html

Choose Archives, then Scanner.

This user said they were trying the technique from this page:

http://cariboo.my-expressions.com/index.html

And the green grass grew all around all around, and the green grass grew all around.

Arrangements

Here is one magnolia arrangement. I made a dozen flower arrangement in the past few days. I let them sit around for a while and I tweak them. This one needs more balance on the left. I've kept this one pretty simple.

This one is a little fuller. I like the cream and burgundy mixed. For some reason or another my blues aren't coming out well tonight. I will keep working on them. I did get some very bright orange daisy-like flowers, but try as I might, they just don't look right in the arrangements.

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I just finished publishing my post when I remembered a neat little trick I read about on another photo blog. Use your flat bed scanner (or all-in-one). Here are some results from my playing:

Just as soon as I remember where I grabbed this, I will post their photo blog page. Take a dried flower (or real flower, or whatever you want) lay it on the scanner glass. It helps to clean the glass, but mine was pretty scratched up. If you look real close you can see the specks.

Leave the lid open. Darken the room as much as you can. When the scanner begins to scan the image, turn your monitor off. This leaves the room as dark as possible. That's it. Tip: don't stare directly into the scanner while it is scanning or you will need some raw potatoes for your eyes.

More of Brandy

I'm not sure if my brother named the pup Brandi or Brandy. I think Brandy. When they got her she was four ounces. She has grown quite a bit. She had no fear. She bounded everywhere without worry about anybody stepping on her. She was full of energy. In the time I was there she took two naps and was on her third when I left. When she was awake she was full throttle. Wide open. No holding back.

I went to Pat Cataan's after work to re-stock my flower craft supply. I got shocked while I was in there and immediately I went into piss-mood. I hate getting shocked. It has been such a mild winter I have not been in the habit of spraying Static Guard on myself every day. It doesn't help a lot anyway. Here I was in one of my favorite places and I was tensed up like a coiled spring ready to explode. But I got some pretty flowers to make centerpieces with. I make them and just give them away. I am not a salesperson. Far from it.

This time I picked up baby boy crafts to add to the arrangements. I'll take pictures and maybe post one or two if they look decent enough to. I am very much an amateur. I used to draw and paint. Everybody asks me "Why don't you paint anymore?" I don't know. I just don't feel it. One day I'll set myself up a small studio and maybe the urge will return.

Well, I get home. Just walked in the door and I get a phone call from my brother. Somehow he deleted Windows. He had a boot disk but he didn't have the program CD. A friend of a friend had built the computer for them about seven or eight years ago. Windows 98. I walked him through a couple of little tricks, but the program is gone. He is in touch with the friend of the friend to get him the 98 CD. I told him if he didn't get one, I have one.

How did he delete Windows? He didn't much want to talk about it. We have all done something that really hosed our computers. Or, most of us have. I know I have done my share. Funny thing is, it may do more good than anything. Wiping the hard drive and starting over is very cleansing for a computer. Gets all the bugs out, so to speak. It will probably run better than ever.

I have been after them to purchase another computer so that I can set them up a router on their Roadrunner and more than one person in the household can use the Internet or MS-Word. My brother had just made me a CD of the Family Tree too. Whew! Hopefully that will all be in tact. Time will tell. If they did backups, I would opt for the low level format of the hard drive. After seven years or so, I would imagine they don't have all of the program disks in one place handy to re-install. Maybe.

March Madness

You would think by the look of this night sky it was October instead of March. This is all I got. I am in the middle of some serious March madness. I am nervous. I got lots to do and time is running out. And I ran out of crafting stuff, too. Blah!

Playing

Above is an untouched photo straight from my camera.




With this photo, I sharpened and used the Contrast feature.



With this one I increased the Hue and Saturation.

It kind of shows you how you can get carried away in tweaking the photos so that they don't even look real. I like to "alert" readers and let them know that my little world is not as pretty as all that. I do have a pair of rose colored glasses in my glove compartment, but I haven't had to wear them lately.

I did have a super pair of shades at one time where I kept having to take them off, because they were so clear it was spooking me. Somehow they still managed to filter out the sun, but I could see super clear and sharp with them. I can' t recall if they were expensive or not either. I usually don't pay a lot for sunglasses. Because when I do, I would sit on them and break them or bend them or lose them or leave them. You know how it goes.

Anyway, my drive today was so grey and wet. I wanted to add some kind of color to the photos.

I have to say that I barely touched up the sunset pictures from Sunday. If at all. That sky was actually blood red. I took some earlier than the later ones. The earlier ones were brighter with more yellow and the later ones were darker with more oranges and reds. I may sharpen them a bit because I had to zoom in over the fields to cut out the electrical wires. Stupid wires! They ruin all of my pictures.

Here is one of the sunset photos after I used the "twirl" feature. This can get really fun but time consuming. You have probably read the joke being passed around the Internet.

"How can you tell when a woman's computer is broken?"

"I don't know, how?"

"Her house is clean!"

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Laugh all you want. I don't care. When my computer is broken, my house still isn't clean. So there!

Yawn, more of same.

Another photo of that spectacular sunset I saw at my brother's house yesterday. There are plenty more pictures of that blood-red sunset and that cute little chihuahua puppy on my Photos page (link can be found on the right sidebar).

It was a quiet rather blah day in the Peruby household. I was able to gather three big trash bags of garbage from the spare bedroom (yay!) and one itty bitty grocery bag of jeans for the Goodwill. Daughter is growing, but has slowed down somewhat. My bird (Peru) can look out the window again. She is better than the dog for announcing visitors. My bird can see the back driveway from her perch and she gives her loud tweet, tweet, tweet over and over again when somebody arrives.

Have you ever had a certain food that you associate with growing up? Mine is a certain type of pizza that we cannot get in my neck of the woods. So, when the family got together yesterday we had to go and get this pizza that we grew up on. We all ordered extra to take back home with us. And, today we are all so sick of it we never want to see it again! Of course it didn't taste the same. Because we ordered such a large amount, I think they rushed it and they burnt it.

Setting Sun

I was just able to get some shots of the setting sun after our family get together today. It went by so quickly. The day and the sunset. 7 out of 8 siblings were there. My brother is healing nicely from his sinus surgery. He purchased a tiny chihuahua. Here she is playing at my daughter's feet. Her name is Brandy. They have five silver silky long-hair Yorkshire Terriers. They plan to breed Brandy to one in a couple of years and call it a Yo-hua-hua (Yo wah wah).

I looked the breed up on the Internet and it appears that it has already been done, but the chosen name was a Chorkie. She was very playful, but I can see that as she ages she will become more aggressive.

It was a fun day and I am exhausted.

Better days and bluer skies

A huge thank-you to all of you in blogdom who sympathized with my post yesterday. It was a bad day and today was better. I did not get any pictures. So, I brought back a picture of the lake near my town. Ohio is full of beautiful lakes. I tried to smudge out the jet trails, but it ended up looking cheesy so I left it as is.

One of my issues was taking my daughter to the doctor. She has no more than a stomach ache, headache and general malaise, but the school requires that any student with more than four days absent in one nine-week period have a doctor's excuse for any more sick days. That is just four simple days (not consecutive). I called around to some of the other high school and none were as strict as hers.

On Monday the school nurse did not think she was sick enough to go home. My daughter called me from her cell phone to come and pick her up. Which I did and she stayed home for three days, went back Thursday and stayed home again today.

She received three detentions for using her cell phone on school property. I am calling Monday to see if I can get that reduced. She tells me that the nurse wouldn't have let her use the school phone to call me because she had already said that she wasn't sick enough. The school says that of course they would have let her use the school phone. Beats me. I will ask nicely. Can't hurt to ask. I figure that yes, she should be punished for using her cell phone, but she wasn't calling a friend to chat, maybe that should count for something.

I had already spoken to the attendance director twice today trying to get her story and his straightened out. The third time I called to get the detentions reduced he was with a student and I didn't get the chance to call him back.

The doctor didn't prescribe anything of course, my daughter is okay now. She just wrote the excuse we need for school so my daughter doesn't receive yet another detention. It is only her freshman year and I am gearing up. I said I wouldn't do this. My sisters went through this with their children. My older sister made me feel better when she said that her home number was on her son's principal's speed dial when he was in high school. Okay. Big breath.

I am looking forward to tomorrow. Almost all my siblings and I will be together. My brother (next to me) had sinus surgery and we are all going to visit him. We don't get his way very often which is quite sad because he lives close to where my Mom's house is. My oldest sister purchased it in 1966. It is the home where I grew up.

Here is the back of the giant house It housed seven of the children plus Mom and Dad. My oldest brother was in the Air Force and lived in Canton when he returned. I think it was built in the early 1900's. We found a letter in the brick of the fireplace dated 1909.

Oh - this one had indoor plumbing. The top middle window is the bathroom. LOL!

A day like today

I have had some day today. I feel like kicking a trash can. Really hard. I long for the day when I took the above photo at lunchtime. At the park near my town. Sunny, warm. Not all of this sour feeling in my stomach.

I did touch up the photo a bit. I think I used a pastel brush effect on it. It has been such a horrible day I can't recall what I did ten minutes ago.

My daughter is having issues at school with the assistant principal. I need to go and talk to him to see what is exactly going on. But there is a fine line. You can't piss them off because they end up taking it out on your child in the long run. I must not let my temper get the better of me or my caustic wit. I must remain calm. I must not kick anything, not even the trash can.

I have a stupid headache that is not responding to Advil. It isn't a migraine. Rather stress related or weather, I don't know. It just will not go away. It could be from the illness that my daughter and I are sharing at this time.

Then there is family. Sisters and brothers. I tend to be the gateway between them. We have some events coming up that will bring feuding siblings together. My stomach hurts from trying to think of how I can smooth things over if this happens or if that happens. My therapist said to "Stop it." Like that can happen. But, I will try.

Now my headache has moved into my cheekbones. I'm going to clean up the kitchen and go to bed. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.

Edit: Oh yeah. I discovered that I made a mistake in my checking account somewhere. Although I am not overdrawn, I am short. I came home to find that the new cat threw up all over the bed downstairs and the basement bathroom carpet. She has been here a month. No new food, the same stuff. I threw the bedspread into the washing machine and when I went to clean up the carpet, it was gone. My daughter wasn't even home. I looked at the dog. Yuck. She just gave me those big brown sad eyes. I guess she was trying to help me. They can sense those things you know. I told her the next time ask for a wet rag.

Interesting roof

I found the roof to this old barn quite an interesting design. This photo was taken sometime last summer evidently.