Beautiful Friday afternoon here! I did my 15 minutes in the attic today -- woo hoo! LOL it was pretty bad. Tossed some old boxes and lugged down some trash. Then I took it out and readied it for the recycling/garbage run.

While I was out there, I cleaned out the carp from under our deck benches. I did that for just 15 minutes, and then bagged up the trash!

In case anyone reading this wants me to add your site to my Photoshop links, read this: Put my site into YOUR links. Then write and ask me to link to you. Come on... it's just common courtesy! And besides, your site looks a lot better to me when you have my link in your list. ;)

Wednesday's posting I wrote when I couldn't get on the internet:

Michael had just a half-day today so it felt like a Friday! I posted the early entries for the Challenge today -- yellow things! :) And I wrote many emails. (I wonder how many!) But the best thing I did today was to work on the garage. I had the whole back of the car filled and we took it to Goodwill. Woo hoo! I'm going to have our lives dejunked yet... and at the same time, other people will feel like they won the lottery when they get our stuff inexpensively.

Our walk was on the IU campus, and it was beautifully sunny and 75°.

My students are in Week 6 now and they're doing great! I've had several sign up for the next session already. Ok.. Deal or No Deal is on! :D

Today's posting:
Today my insightbb is experiencing "scheduled interruptions," and that makes for a less-than-cool day for someone who lives on the internet. The funny thing is that last night our water was shut off because of a break in a watermain (we didn't know why). AND our internet was off too. We were almost wondering if the internet is perhaps... WATER-powered!

I got my email to send! YAY! The Challenge is on. Topic for this month is "My favorite color is... Yellow!" I have gotten NO Challenge entries today! A flurry yesterday, but then none today.

I've just sent out Lesson 6 -- the last one for the Spring session. :) I really love teaching these classes, but it's always a relief to be at the end of a session, too. This one went particularly well, with affable and diligent students.

I already have several signups for next session, which starts 24 May, and these students seem like lots of fun, too.

I was writing an email to Dorothy and we had been talking about plastic. I wonder if my brother and sister share this memory:

I have a memory of a Christmas ... it was probably in the mid 60's... when my stepdad presented my mother with a *complete set* of Melmac dishes in olive green! Oh, but they were LOVELY! I thought that we must be the richest people alive to have such beautiful dishes! And we used those till the pattern wore off of them. LOL!

I did some updating in my Gallery today! Here are the new pages:

Drawings & Paintings

Greeting Cards

Photo Art

Gradations3

I have lots more stuff that I should post.

I got an email from an author in Spain who's going to use a couple of my pieces of art in his book on math and art:

and

The world is conspiring to end my Art Challenge, I'm afraid. I am just not able to send out emails to all 520 on my Challenge mailing list, or at least I just can't figure out how to do it. Hotmail limits me to sending to 100 recipients in a DAY, and so .. that doesn't work. Gmail... same thing, only I think it's 150.

I've always sent my announcements out with myJanee.com, but now, with their fancy new email thing, if one person in the list has an invalid email address, NONE of them go! How stupid is this? I could just cry.

And to top it all off, my Community Board is slow as pondwater today.

A new Art Challenge! Well... almost! I was just about ready to get ready to announce it and then got carried away with putting my desk together in the RV.

It's a very cute desk! Mine is almost like this, except mine has cuter hardware. ;) This is the company we ordered from too -- Home Decorators Collection. GREAT service and I could not be happier with the desk! We took out a small table that was behind the passenger's seat and the new desk nestles comfortably in that area.

Lovely weather today here! 70's for our walk on the IU campus. Everything is in bloom and the air is fragrant!

Ok .. Eddie's telling me that it's time for him to be brushed! :D

Plastic kids?

I got another email from a woman wanting to know how to do "pageant retouching." Here is an example of this sort of thing. I pointed out that this is really not "retouching," but involves recreating the image so that not much of the original photo remains.

But what's the point of this? Is it good to take a photo of a beautiful child and make her look like she would shatter if she fell off the shelf? To take lovely expressive eyes and replace them with glassy vacant doll eyes? I'm just not there.

Sure, I'll retouch. I'll whiten teeth, open eyes up, make wrinkles a little less deep, trim up hair and neaten clothing. I'll even help someone lose a little weight. But to completely replace a child's mouth because she has lost a tooth? Remove braces? Urgh.. The money would have to be pretty good. LOL. However, I wouldn't take a kid and make her plastic for the measly $60 that these artists are getting.

Ok.. I know that I posted that it was green out today, but my post isn't there! Anyway.. what I said is that it is rainy and it's getting very green, almost to the point where it looks fakey.

I found 7 mushrooms (morels) in the backyard on Sunday and I cooked them up for Michael for supper tonight. He loved them!

It seemed like all I got done today was email, though I did get Lesson 5 sent out to my students and spent two hours going through their assignments and reading all the posts.

On our walk this evening, we tromped across campus in the dank 50° chill.

Oh, and I'm reading a book! Well, it's going to be a book when the right agent comes to his or her SENSES and decides to take this to a publisher. This is a mystery written by my best friend Dave, and it is SOOO good!

I've decided that I really love blogging. Here's a cherry pie that I made for the Hiking Club's picnic on the last day that we were in Tucson.

Yummy? You bet!

We just watched Deal or No Deal (my new favorite show) and Apprentice. The guy won over $400K on dond and my least fave pita Andrea, was fired. So a good night. :D

Man.. finally Blogspot got going after some hairy scary problems that had them out for a long time (well... less than a day, but nearly a day). I had tried to post my Sunday entry several times, and I think that they had all of my attempts on there till I deleted them. Anyway.. I hope that things are cool now.

I wrote a new Photoshop tutorial today -- making an Action to create Rule of Thirds Guidelines. It's pretty cool, and I hope if you're into PS that you'll have a look! In fact.. if you're just into photography, this is kinda cool. Any comments are, of course, welcome!

I'm working on writing my new Fix Your Photos class. It will be offered starting in the Fall Session and it's looking cool so far.

Today I'm watching the Eagle Cam! I can't actually get it to work on this computer (my big one) but am watching it on my laptop. So now I have four screens active on my desk! LOL I'm such a brat!