Happy Saturday to us! What a beautiful day it is today, too. It's low 70's at 1pm, sunny, the leaves are greening, flowered trees are all in bloom, and the bees are flying happily about. Perfect day for Little 500 Bicycle Race here in Bloomington.

And it was a perfect day for us to do some closet dejunking! We blessed Goodwill with 20 bags stuffed full of things that at one time were shiny and new and we couldn't live without. Today we can live without all of it!

I guess myJanee.com was down ydy afternoon, but I wasn't aware because we were gone. We drove to Louisville to visit our broker. On the way, we stopped at Backyard Burger and had a pleasant lunch. Then we drove through pouring, blowing, puddling rain almost the whole rest of the way down there (2 hours) and that was tough.

Our appointment went well, all's very cool with our investments, and we left there thinking that Grandpa would be proud. :)

Dinner was at California Pizza Kitchen, one of our favorite places to eat. We shared the fusilli with broccoli and sundried tomatoes.. with chicken, and it was divine, as always.

After that, we went to Graeter's where we had good ice cream, but we agreed that Graeter's does not even APPROACH Handel's. (I am just now printing a listing of Handel's locations for when we head east! There are a bunch in Ohio! hehe)

I had to get a crown prep done ydy. The appt wasn't till 2:10 and I didn't get out of there till after 5. All that time with my mouth propped open. Urf. Thank goodness for bite blocks and Trina who kept my slobber vacuumed up. I am happy that I'm going to be getting a sweet new crown to replace that tooth which had become a tongue-toy.

I've added a few new sites to my Photoshop Resource Links. I added Jill Greenberg's Manipulator site to my Photo Galleries and ArtWorld and t-Tutorials to my Tutorials: Special Effects page.

I am working on getting the junk out of the house. It's funny how it is so much easier to BUY things than it is to get rid of them! I do wish I had the GUTS to have a yard sale. I just hate to .. what? Give the stuff away? We're talking a garage FULL of stuff. And if we decide to sell this house ultimately to live in the motorhome, then there's going to be, of course, much more. Arf. Overwhelming to think about, but I'm working on it a little at a time, and that's all I can do.

Students are doing great in Week 4 of the Spring session.

Oh.. I'm looking into gmail. I actually have an account which I'm not now using. I found out that if you use "death" or "died" in your email, Google won't put ads on your email. A guy in a forum wrote that he'd gotten an email from someone about a relative dying, and there were ads down the side for coffins and funeral services! He wrote to them that that was in bad taste. No kidding! "No trees died in the creation of this message." for a sigline? LOL why not?

Ok, let's try Trebuchet. And let's get off that black! Next I need to figure out how to change that inane header art. NO, that is NOT my art! And why can't I put emoticons in here, anyway?

All day today my Hotmail was telling me that the server was unavailable. WEll.. so I finally wrote to their support folks and BAM! It's working again! I asked them in my posting if they would jiggle some wires.

Lovely and warm today. I should go out and look for mushrooms but... like everything else I should do, it's remaining undone.

Students and I come off break tomorrow. I got into the boards today to get caught up! They're on fire and I love it!

Man... I'm working on getting a guy to take my work off his site. He has the chutzpah to even suggest that I didn't come up with my ideas myself, that I've "borrowed" them or varied them somewhat to come up with my tutorials. Well I didn't.

And this guy didn't even vary my work. He pasted it up on his site intact, using my images and my text, word-for-word. I even wrote him a short essay on creativity in response to his suggestion that my work is not unique:

"And yes, it really is my work. It's naïve for you to suggest that there is a limited amount of Photoshop knowledge out there, to suggest that everyone copies everyone else, or that my ideas can't have been mine. You're wrong about this, and as a teacher, you should know better.

"There is an infinite variety of objects out there, each of which has its own artistic merit. If it can be seen, it can be photographed, and if it can be photographed, it can be shown as pixels. Pixels can be recreated in Photoshop, and so there you are. Anything that you can see can be recreated in Photoshop. And you can call it an effect and write a tutorial about how to do it. Dig deeply and find your own creativity! Your own ideas might even be better than mine, and they will be yours."

Well, I really hope that I don't have to take further action on this. I hate confrontation, but I'll do what I need to protect my work.

I nearly forgot! I've discovered something very fun and very cool for puzzle fiends out there. It's USA Today's Sudoku! They vary in difficulty and the interface is so easy to use and user-friendly. No more little pencil marks -- just little clicks! :D

Hey there!
We had a happy day for Easter, and I continue to enjoy my break from classes. Don't worry though; I'll be rarin' to get back into it on Wednesday!

I have been working on photos from our Tucson journey, and here's one:I took this on the Yetman Trail, a part of Saguaro National Park. This was an old house which had burned out, leaving only the stone shell. What a view they had!

I am working today to put links to my Online Classes onto each of my tutorial pages. Big job. I don't even know HOW many tutorial pages I have, but it's ... many.

Storms yesterday, but things are greening up here. Redbuds are budding and dogwoods are beginning to dog. They say the morels are going to be coming up very soon; I have not yet been out to look.