Simply Curious

Finally got to see Williamsburg - our anniversarymoon AND graduation celebration trip.  We managed to hit the perfect time - lovely weather, flowers all out, and hardly any crowds.  I still need to work on my photography skills, but for now must be content in trying to 'rescue' what photos I did get.

Other than a weird blurryness in the bottom left of many of my photos, my biggest problem was I didn't want tourists in the picture.  So . . . I took 'em out.

Before editing - I mostly just wanted the carriage.

After - cropping and the rubber stamp tool removed what I didn't want.

Yes, it's somewhat blurry, I had to be quick, plus he was moving.  I figure from here I can add some sort of watercolor effect to make the blurryness seem intentional.  I was lucky with this image in that the details behind the tourists were easy to figure out and fake.  I can't do it with all of the photos!

In our kitchen we have a large print of the Governor's Palace, nicely balanced in the center of one wall, framed by wrought iron candleholders.  I was hoping to find some smaller prints to go with it while we were down there, but nothing really appealed to me.  So I've decided I would take some of my pictures, play with them to match the watercolor/impressionistic effect of the big print, and hang them on either side.  I was thinking of stringing three small framed photos on a large ribbon on each side.

It wasn't until we got back and I looked at the print again that I learned for the first time that it's of the BACK of the palace.  Now I'm annoyed - I never bothered to take more than a blurry photo of the front because I thought I had it already!

That's right.  Everything has been turned in, and my only final exam was yesterday.  (I got a 94 on it, and you should have seen all the study guides I created.)  I will find out all of this semester's final grades hopefully by this weekend.  It's kind of weird to realize I don't have to go to school tomorrow, or today, or ever.

One of my classes was so much fun I'm going to continue it for a bit.  It was a course on the history of animation, and just as awesome as you think it would be.  Every week we had to write a 500 word blog post on something, anything, related to animation.  I did this over in Wordpress because professors hate Blogger for some odd reason.  They claim it's due to spam commenting but I've never seen any here.  *knocks on wood*   I have TWO blogs at the moment.  I don't really like Wordpress, so I may move the content from it to here and incorporate it into this blog.  I'll have to think about it.  In the meantime, here's a link if you're curious.

Animusings - thoughts on storytelling and animation.

This post is partly a test to see if I fixed my problem on my oneluckybug home site.  I'm trying to get it to show previews of the blog over there, but it crashed randomly the other day and wouldn't work.  We shall see.

This being my 1,000th post, I knew I would have to have something special to write about.  It was only timing that would determine whether it would be about finishing college or the arrival of my niece.  The niece got here first!

Lauren Louiese* Bell
Born May 6 at 7:44 am
7 lbs, 10 oz, 19 inches long

Mom and daughter are doing fine.

So glad you finally joined us, Lauren!

(*Louiese is a family middle name passed down several generations, odd spelling and all.  My great-grandmother had a lot of brothers who liked to call her Louis, and she felt an extra 'e' would improve the femininity.)

Acquire ninja cookie cutters from ThinkGeek.

 Acquire sugar cookie recipe.

Combine and bake.  (careful, they burn easy.  must be why Ninjas wear black and lurk in the dark.)

Acquire gel icing set in whatever colors you want.


Take cookies and icing to college.  Show them to your friends.  Sit back and prepare to laugh.

Be surprised by their excitement and enthusiasm and slightly pleased that they want to do something more than squirt icing on a cookie and eat.

Be very amazed at their awesome, awesome results.