Tonight was Lanie’s last middle school orchestra concert. How time flies. This evening she received recognition for her playing, and a medal for her three years’ attendance.
It’s a tradition for the concert to finish with the 8th grade orchestra playing the theme tune from the movie ‘The Pink Panther’ which explains why there is a lot of pink to be seen, and why some students, like Lanie, have panther whiskers.
Lanie will be in high school next year – wow. That also means that our year of not having to do a school run every day is coming to a close.
Wet snow likely on the higher Ozark Plateau tonight. Temperatures will be near freezing tonight. An additional one inch of slushy wet snow accumulations may be possible tonight on the plateau. Elsewhere, scattered rain showers tonight with some isolated flooding possible over the Eastern Ozarks. – NOAA
It’s been snowing on and off since nine O’clock this morning. It has not settled, but it has been snowing. Big, heavy, wet flakes. Not bad for May by anybody’s standards.
The brief was fairly straightforward. Take an existing drawing of a map, colorize it and add more map labels. The challenges were firstly, that the map was already colored, and secondly the elements of the drawing would have to be moved to make space for the additional labels.
The first job was to find a way of reliably extracting the ink drawing from the colored background. Then I had to separate the various elements so that I could work on them, and have full control of the coloring process as I was expecting to go through several revisions with the customer.
Saturday, and the image I have been asked to work on:
The Original Drawing
Later: All the different elements have been extracted. island, sea, inset images, compass and border. Fortunately all the smaller labels were already available as separate Photoshop Layers, so I’ve not needed to do anything with them (so far). The font is going to change to improve readability, so I may have to re-size them.
Intermediate Edit
End of the day Saturday: using some printed samples I’d been given, I matched the colors, and started adding color detail.
End of the first editing Session.
Sunday: now all the color detail has been added. The color of the lakes needs to change. The ground’s color has been shifted towards yellow and de-saturated.
End of the second editing session.
I have a Web conference with the customer Monday, the screen sharing technology will enable him to see different color options as I change them. This will enable us to finalize the colors and speed up the process too. Then I can work on the inset images, border, and finally add the label text.
I spent Saturday working on colorizing a book and website illustration, Sunday I was scheduled to usher at church. So, there was no chance to get out and hike or backpack this weekend. …
Old man’s beard on the trees at the edge of the bluff – Hercules Glades
Not my beard I should add. In among the trees the lighting was quite good – though the wind coming up the bluff was blowing the old man’s beard it all over the place. We think it’s growing here because of the moist micro-climate created by the bluff and creek.
Every so often the knot under the sole between my toes breaks off. When it does I have to stop and tie a new one. I heat seal the new knot to make sure it doesn’t come undone.
A picture from last weekend’s backpacking trip. We were checking out a stock pond to see if it might provide drinking water. The pond was not only quite large, but also surrounded by cattails (I know them as bull rushes) that had started to break apart and seed.
The schools in Springfield were closed on Friday, so we took advantage of the long weekend to go on our first backpacking trip since last September.
A couple of things influenced our choice of where to go. First Lanie was staying with the Grandparents. Second we are both very out of condition. We wanted to be able to take things easy, but also see some new sights. There’s a set of bluffs on the western side of Hercules Glades that we’d found on the maps and explored a little on Google Earth. This was a great opportunity to go and have a look.
We left home on time to meet up with Ginger’s parents at Ava at 11:30am. Jim treated us to lunch at the Subway at Ava, and then off we went. Shortly after 2pm. we were on the trail.
You can read my write up of our trip on Ozarks Walkabout. The highlight of the trip was spending Saturday afternoon resting and enjoying the spring sunshine on top of a 260 ft. bluff overlooking Beaver Creek. In total over the three days we only hiked 10 miles and climbed 1500 feet.
We got back to the trailhead around 1:30pm on Sunday and then went to Ginger’s parents for a family afternoon and dinner.
Bluff on Beaver Creek – Hercules Glades Wilderness
I’ll be writing more in a few days. For now, we camped at the top of this 260ft. bluff last night. It took a bit of bush-whacking to get there but it was worth it.
I know the weather in the Ozarks can be variable, but…
There’s a cold front on it’s way and according to the OEM Extended outlook:
“
There is a 50 degree difference between the warm and cold sides of the front. The slow moving front is projected to make it to US 65 by sunrise Wednesday (04-10-13) morning.
Of course as Ginger points out, that’s the temps up in the clouds. It’s still a big difference though!
I caught myself using the dreadful American pronunciation of the word herb tonight – ‘erb. It’s terrible, it’s herb with an aitch. I need to go and wash my mouth out. On the upside does this mean sometime soon I’ll stop getting into the passenger side of the van when I’m driving?
The second Sunday in Easter, and Ms. Charlotte’s Birthday
Today, for the first time in a while I wasn’t scheduled to be an usher at church.
So, I was able to sit back and enjoy the service which included the vestry (and myself) being ‘commissioned’. Lanie, for her part, did an excellent job in the fairly sparsely populated Junior Choir.
After the service we celebrated a parishioner’s birthday and I took a few pictures including some cute shots of the couple of the kids. It’s just as well that I’ve now gotten into the habit of taking the camera bag with me whenever I head out to church.
Ginger hates how frustrated I get with software. However, the above message is typical of the sort of experiences I have every day.
At least this error message made me smile. There was a bonus too. On re-pressing the button it, WordPress this time, did what it was supposed to do. That’s a much better record than most of the software I use.
I have two key requirements of software.
Any self-respecting software designer/engineer who doesn’t know what I want the software to do is obviously a total twit
When I press a button, it should do what I (or any reasonable user) might expect it to do — not necessarily what it was designed to do 🙂 Any self-respecting software designer/engineer who doesn’t know what I want the software to do is obviously a total twit (that’s remarkably temperate language for me when referring to software designers). If they actually used the software they developed, they’d know that what I expect it to do is the right thing. Which leads me to point two.
I expect the software designer/engineer to have actually tried to use their software before they release it. Oh, hold on, if they actually did that, we’d probably not have any software. For example, what was the developer of the Facebook album editor thinking of? Try using the scroll bar on the edge of an image’s description field without accidentally dragging the image across the screen. Go on, try it. It’s next to downright impossible. As to actually editing text that’s at the bottom of the edit window. It’s almost impossible ‘cos most of the time when you put your cursor there, the stupid ‘where was this taken?’ dialogue pops up.
I could go on and on, but I’d probably burst a blood vessel and have a stroke
I could go on and on, but I’d probably burst a blood vessel and have a stroke. Instead I’ll go off and search the Internets for soothing images of sunsets and kittehs.
Blowing out the candlesIt’s that time of year again, it seems Lanie gets older every year! What happened to the seven year old who was here when I first visited the US? …
This time last year we were backpacking with Lanie at Piney Creek Wilderness, encountering a rather fat Copperhead on the Sac River trail, and I listened to a complete reading of Matthew (Note to self: take cushions if I ever plan on spending over two hours sitting in the pews).
Today I had a long day at Church. Not as long as the Adult Choir though. They were at church rehearsing at 6:30 am sang at the seven o’clock service and were back for the eleven o’clock service!
Luckily for me, unlike the choir, my day didn’t start until 8:30 am, checking the church was ready and handing out a few bulletins before taking pictures of the children Flowering the Cross. Overnight rain and an uncertain weather outlook meant the flowering was done inside this year – the unbalanced mix of fluorescent lights is always a challenge for taking pictures, so I threw in a couple of flash shots – especially when I needed a deeper depth of field. To steal from my post on Facebook about trying to get pictures of the kids, “While Pandemonium didn’t rule, it seemed to have a pretty good working majority”. Mary and Sherrie deserve medals!
With kids running everywhere, it was a bit of a ‘spray and pray’ session. That is, take a load of pictures and pray that enough kids are standing still and no one is running into, or, out of the shot.
Next year I’ll make sure I’m not scheduled to be an usher while I’m trying to take pictures. I totally missed the children’s Easter egg hunt while I was tidying up the church after the 9:00 am service. I popped back into church to get a few more pictures before the 11:00 am service started and discovered we were an usher short, so I stayed and helped out.
This afternoon Jim and Carol popped in on one of their regular trips into Springfield. Jim brought his latest sculpture in for me to photograph. It was cold and I didn’t want to try and heat the studio/garage up for a shoot, so I did a quick tabletop shoot. Quick being a relative term as it took a while to get the backdrop in place, and then some playing with a reflector until I was happy enough with the results.
I liked this piece the moment I first saw the pictures Carol sent to us last week. Ginger wasn’t so sure. It’s Jim’s first big move into more abstract art. Up to now his work has been quite representational. This afternoon we chatted about what we liked, and didn’t. Well, they chatted while I set up and took pictures. I processed the pictures straight away so that Jim could see the final images. I have a couple still in the camera that I took outside. Now I just need to get the prints to Jim and that’s the job done.
‘String Sensations’ Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
‘String Sensations’ get ready to play. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
‘String Sensations’ in action. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
I’ll give Lanie the benefit of the doubt and assume the shoes were a deliberate introduction of pink. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
Lanie can spot a camera across a crowded middle school gym. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
Lanie can spot a camera across a crowded middle school gym. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
Eighth Grade Orchestra. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
Going to collect a certificate. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
Lanie with a certificate in hand. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
And a medal. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
One wonders why her music teacher referred to Lanie as ‘Mad Woman Lanie’. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
Eighth Grade Orchestra. Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.
Seeding Cattails by a stock pond
Stock pond and cattails
View from the bluff
View from the bluff above Beaver Creek
View from the bluff
View from the bluff above Beaver Creek
View from the bluff above Beaver Creek
Camped near the top of the bluff
