A little project

... I've had this frame ABOUT a year and finally decided to put photos from the two recent graduations and the big 50th anniversary party into it... the pictures were full of clashy and bright colors, until I had a brainstorm(it was a very SMALL storm....more like a passing shower ) and converted all three of them to sepia.

Now it goes very nicely in that big empty spot on my kitchen wall. It was a floating glass frame but I stuck paper in since I don't have kitchen wallpaper.

The middle photo is the golden anniversary couple and all of their grandchildren. Awwwwww.

And for you scrappers... Paper Adventures, Heirloom Interiors, Vintage Rose-Peach. I've had it a few years... so good luck finding it. But it is archival paper.

Frasier

Photo by moi... this morning, on my rainy walk... it took 20 minutes of stalking to get one good shot, but I love this...

I have an odd affection for this bird... he has been hanging around my pond for years. Sometimes I see him in the old dead tree, up in the woods behind my house. He will eventually decide to go back to the pond and fly over my head with a whooop whooop whooop.

Once (long ago) I saw him standing on one foot for no particular reason in the back of my yard, and figured my neighbor had made some sort of a bizzarre scarecrow as a practical joke. Then I opened the window for a closer look, and about had a heart attack when he spread his wings and took off.

Really, they're big.

(The largest North American heron, with a head-to-tail length of 91–140 cm (36-55 in), a wingspan of 167-201 cm (66-79 in), and a weight of 2–3.6 kg (4.4-8 lbs), it is blue-gray overall,..... thanks wiki... )

And it's not ACTUALLY a Crane. But back when I watched him fish every day, I named him Frasier. That was right after I'd had my gallbladder out, and was just starting to take walks to get my strength back and recuperate. I'd walk to the bench, sit for a while, and since it was usually around 9 am, he'd be out looking for his breakfast.

Cheesecake Tuesday

Pumpkin Caramel today. Excellent.

Carly(via Blackberry)

It's a beautiful day

....So of course I am in the ER

During mass I killed a giant millipede that was headed Stanley's way. Squished it right there on the rug . Icky. No lie, it was four or five inches long.

I escaped for a little while after lunch. I ran errands and then found a nice shady place to sit, with some little frosted things and ice tea from starbucks.... enjoying being outdoors.

Called home on my way into the market. Mr Carly managed to cut his leg on some metal, so I abandoned the grocery run. When I got home it was definitely bleeding pretty badly.... So here I sit, waiting for the suture king.

Carly(via Blackberry)

My blackberry is a vegetable too

My daughter joked to me yesterday.... "You should say 'Okie Dokie artichokie' Mom".

From there we went off on a tangent about how she doesn't like those tiny little fish in a can.

Yeah, I was lost too, at first. She mixes up things when her hampster falls off the wheel.
Artichoke, anchovy, ....sardines. So glad I paid for that tuition.

My blackberry troubles this week wasted a ton of time. Oy. Allegedly I can get money back on the battered shell, but since it's fried I'll wait and see if that pans out. I am growing fond of the new one. I just wish yahoo didn't suck on it. I liked the app I had. I do like a couple of the new apps like ScoreMobile that I've found.

Two weeks till the big graduation party; I have about 75 people coming and I'm still in denial about how screwed I am. Dummy. I have so much to do...
~Char
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"Create the world you want to see."

letters

Dear Michael Jackson,
I couldn't care ANY less. Either way. Really.

I'm not in the "he's the greatest superstar ever" OR the "he's a freak" team. Although I lean to the latter. But then I think a lot of brilliant artists are REALLY, really emotional wrecks. I know I am, hahahaha.

We were at the baseball field last night when he expired, and all of the parents with Blackberrys were chatting about 'he's in the hospital', 'he's dead', etc. It was funny because my friend's wife called him to say "MJ is dead" and we had all known for an hour. We talked about how we used to get BIG news when we got home from sports events, because we would have been in an information void while we sat at that game, 25 years ago. Viva la wireless technology.

Dear Research In Motion,
so help me god if your automatic updates fry my PC the way they killed my little Red crackberry... it won't be pretty.

I spent 5 hours waiting for an upgrade to finish on Red, (I knew it was bad but steps 1 & 2 that ran were "backup everything" and "delete everything" so I was trapped.... and the damn thing crapped out on step 11. Of 11. ) It totally fried the operating system and I could not restore it, despite 3 attempts. I gave up and got a new one, since I was elegible for upgrade. ATT doesn't have the Storm, so I stuck with the BB Curve since I like it. The camera's better, the whole thing runs faster, and the browser's a little nicer than what I had.... but what a horrible way to get there. I sat and cried at my pc the other night then thought "Get a grip, C".

Dear PC,
really, stop with the fan noise increasing in pitch. It's freaking me out. Seriously. Stop it.

I do have a nice new external drive and I have backed up my data. I see myself shopping for a purchase I don't want to make, in the very near future.

Dear former employer,
thank you for giving me this wonderful summer day off, with pay. And yesterday, and last month, and... well, you know what I mean. But giving me the axe in a group setting? That kind of sucked. Still not thrilled about that. Just saying...

~Carly

Shooting golfers

So today is the school golf tourney; I take pictures of the groups and print onsite. My HP Photosmart is 3 or 4 years old has been acting wonky so I bought this new Canon Selphy.

My selection process was very elaborate - I didn't have much time, and there was one choice. I bought it. ;-)

It's a little odd. The paper feeds all of the way through from the front, and then goes back and forth a few times for the color layers (yellow, magenta, cyan....). So you need room behind it. But it's quicker than the HP and smaller, as you can see.

The ink cartridge is strange because it's two bands with some sort of ink-coated cellophane, but is perfectly matched to the paper quantity it comes along with.

I'm pretty happy about the picture quality. So maybe I'll let my kids have the HP. Hahahahaha.....

~Char
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"Create the world you want to see."

Rain Rain Go Away

IMG_2949
Originally uploaded by carlyq80

... after I'm done photographing, that is. I like to shoot sometimes with a little bit of cloud cover in the sky so that the glare isn't a problem....

Busy, I've been so busy. Two graduations and the requisite midnight bowling afterwards and then someone else's graduation party and of course Father's day... the piles of papers on my desk are getting deeper. And I have a party to throw in less than 3 weeks.

Hi kids, welcome to summer. We have work to do!

Insanity rules

So I got a cabinet from Suzy when she moved - one of the ones that goes over "the throne", if you will.

I threw away the old "spare roll" holder we'd been using, and stashed some paper inside the new cabinet. Then I thought "hhhhmmmm. Someday I'll see this space empty, when I need it NOT to be. "

I wrote this note and can now report IT WORKED.

So, I'm crazy. But I've got paper....

Carly(via Blackberry)

Flowers don't say cheeeeese

...but I like to photograph them anyway.


Love using the macro mode to catch tiny details....


and I love that these managed to grow in my garden despite my "not really green" thumb.

And that this happened in my kitchen, just before I threw the dead flowers from this arrangement away...

Wii fit update

Things I like / dislike about the wii... which I have been faithfully using for 12 days now, only missing one day.

I hate the female trainer. She is perky and skinny and just not my kind of girl. Also, why are both of the wii trainers lilly-white? Diversity. Geez. I think I would like her more if she was a curvy Latina with a trace of an accent. I'm not even kidding. She would seem friendlier that way. VanillaGirl is very cold and unfriendly.

I like the guy. Don't know why. I don't see him as particularly manly (not to say he's effeminate, just kind of average) , but he's not as threatening to me as IceGirl. I like hearing him say "Way to Go!" when I don't actually fall off the board doing a one-legged balance pose. (Don't laugh. It happens. Then the trainer says "you put your foot down, didn't you?" Oh, right, a computer is now going to give me attitude. Thank you. )

Today the Wii decided I was spending too much time with him and gave me the female trainer. Really - she actually showed up on my screen and said "I hope you don't mind, I 'll be filling in for your regular trainer today. Um, I don't think so! Luckily she went away after one yoga pose. Buh bye, doll. It would be nice to be able to have my son or my daughter be my coach. Well, not my son, because he laughs himself silly over how I do on some of the balance games.

I have been running again. Today is the first day I would charactarize what I did as actually resembling running, because it was almost evenly split between walk a while, run a while, but that's not really the point I'm getting to. You can enter non-wii exercise in the log on the wii fit. It will show up as a gray part of the bar graph showing your daily workouts - almost like they don't believe you. "Well, you say so, but we're not giving it a pretty color. " The other gripe I have is that you can only enter exercise for TODAY. No matter which date you click on the calendar, you log it to today. Losers. Work on that part of the code, wiiGeeks.

I would still recommend it to my fellow couch potatoes though... the yoga feedback on whether you're really balancing well is definitely helping me. And I can navigate a soap bubble through a rocky canyon. No lie.

Random website recommendation

I was in the library with my daughter looking for books on Hitler (oh what a fun time that was...) and I noticed a book called The Gallery of Regrettable Food and managed to find the author's website.

The main site is http://www.lileks.com/ and there are enough interesting things to keep just about all of you busy until I come up with some time to work on this blog!

I am actually doing some work on a web page for a friend of a friend; the web page content is about a recording artist who is working on his second cd. I am LOVING this little project. I won't get paid all that much, but the money will go into a secret hiding place to be saved up for a REAL camera. I'm thinking maybe a Canon digital rebel. Modes, baby. Lots of shooting modes and buttons and fun stuff. And I want a 24-105 zoom lens. Just smile and nod...

Clicks

Just a few random pictures here, with comments... this weekend was very mixed, weather-wise, but I managed to enjoy the good weather and duck the bad. At Country Drive-in I saw a 59 Corvette convertible. I immediately sent a picture of the car to Suzy with a request to have one for my very own; I have yet to hear back from her. I like how the two headlights and the area below make a face.... or am I the only one who sees that?

sigh... yes, I thought so.

Earlier in the day my son and I took in the scenery at the visitor's center at the point where the Hudson River splits off into the Erie Canal... (we were too late for the farmer's market, my bad)

This is an example of some of the clouds that were out and about in the evening, before the thunderstorms moved in. I love clouds. Don't know why. Did you hear they might officially declare a new type of cloud? really ... first Pluto isn't a planet and now they want to declare that there are FOUR types of clouds? I need to lie down. It gives me a headache.

More clouds, earlier in the day, after a trip to Michaels (!) and the market (boooo). I swear that the upper mountains in the shot below are in Vermont, at least it seems that way because I don't usually see them. And, I shoot very CROOKED these days. I need to get a tiny bubble level and put it on the back of my darn camera. But this is, I believe, one of the ones I shot out of the sunroof of my car. SO that may be why it's a little crooked. It's vistas like this that are part of why I like living here, and not in some really flat place where the wind can blow along a tumbleweed for miles. (I'm hurtling downhill here at about 70 mph. Hi Mom.)

And then there are the falls. Pretty huh? You can find these in Cohoes. It's not like they hide them or anything....

Too much to do these days.... that's all the time I have for you, internets... it's not you, it's me....

Attention wildlife

Apparently my property is NOT the place for you to be havin' young'uns.... Just saying.

Carly(via Blackberry)

Found it!

Kudos to Emmay for saying "it's probably under your car seat" in a text message. For the life of me, I don't know how it got there. I guess it fell out of my purse. Unfortunately I didn't find the OTHER missing thing, the paper I need... not under my carseat. Oy.

But... happy Friday. It's rainy and I have no plans, which could sink me down pretty quickly, but I think I'm going to do a little bit around here, and work out, and then go use the Michael's gift card that my sister gave me, after a nice lunch. Because That Bank is still paying me for not showing up. Awesome.

Really really dead!

Sorry about the multiple post on the previous item. I guess my Blackberry was traumatized too. Not as much as me. I took a walk over to ponder how to throw the squirrel in the woods, (shovel? work gloves? ) and it's a baby bunny. Boooo hoooo.

Wild fricken' kingdom

I looked out my family room window and saw a hawk swoop down and snatch up a hapless squirrel. He landed in the apple tree in my neighbor's yard. Three robins immediately freaked out and chased him away (from their nests, I presume, since there was a baby bird in my hedges when I was trying to cut them. He lived. The squirrel ain't looking so good where the hawk dropped him. )

This reminds me, I never blogged about how really stupid the deer are in Pennsylvania. Honestly, there are dead deer all over those highways. I even saw one that had been torn into three pieces by whatever hit it. Yummy.

Enjoy your dinner.

Carly(via Blackberry)

You might say

...She is having a very good day.

I guess that's what the secret wink is all about. I just walked by the room, and saw her sitting on a pile of stuff, winking at me

Carly(via Blackberry)

Tilt

There is a subtle trend in all of my photos. They tilt a leeeeeetle bit to one side. How annoying. I guess I have to tape a level to the back of the camera...

I added about ten of my favorite photos from last night's shoot to my Flickr photostream.

Meet up

Someone forwarded a "meet up" link to me, and it was for a kayak group, but I don't have a kayak yet. I looked around the site and found a photography group, and so I went to the Empire State Plaza to meet some of the other members to take some photos tonight... these are two of my favorites.

I definitely had the baby camera of the bunch - no lens switching for me... but I have at least 15 shots I really like (out of probably 150 +, thank god for digital)

The one above is a long exposure, self timer with a tripod, and then you know I had to show you one that I played with tonal curves because I just can't NOT DO IT sometimes.

For you who are not familiar, this is The Egg.... not the mother ship of an alien race. It's actually a small theater and was the scene of the crime for the recent field trip I chaperoned.

Huh. I had way more fun tonight ;-)