Oh what a beautiful day!
Attila has five of the six rows of wood stacked in the wood shed. He has been hard at it, that is a LOT of wood. However, he has only one row left to stack in the wood shed for next winter. And then… he begins to stack the following winter’s wood supply, outdoors on skids. This year our heating fuel will be stored and drying by the middle of May, a record for us!
I have been working on my photographs. The new camera is a lot of fun, and I am just learning how it works; mostly by learning how it doesn’t work. I have created two new galleries, you can view them by clicking on the links in the right column, under the heading Galleries. There is the Altered StatesGallery, which includes a few photos that I have altered with the various settings in the graphics software. There is also the Natural Gallery, which includes photos that have not been significantly altered by graphics software, except for some minor colour and light adjustments.
I began by downloading and installing a few gallery plugins for WordPress. The first was awkward to use, and the results were unexpected, and unattractive. The second held promise, the demo galleries it created were beautiful. It was miserable to install, and then it would not display the image file. After hours and hours spent in the attempt to make these plugins work as desired, I gave up.
I ended up using Graphic Converter for the Mac to create the galleries. Then I moved them into Dreamweaver and began to edit and organize the files. It took a bit of doing, but the result is that the galleries are uploaded and linked to this blog. The pages are independent of WordPress, but at the bottom of each page in the gallery there is a link back to this journal.
The barn photograph project is bigger than I had anticipated. I already have 35 photographs of barns ready for the web. However, about half of the files remain unexamined and in need of preparation for the web. These images were shot through a glass car window, in a vehicle travelling at about 90 kilometres per hour. There are a few photos of blue sky, pure blue sky, others of blurred gravel or pavement, and these need to be deleted. Not the best shooting conditions, but Attila was having no part of stopping with great frequency, on the trip home from our little house in the city. At the best of times it is a four hour drive, which is quite long enough. So, the photos were taken from the moving car, as we travelled home.
I have been reading academic articles on the subject of barns, and not finding them terribly helpful. Eventually the method to organize the photographs will come to me. Until then it is best to just keep editing, and poking around the net looking for reliable sources of information.
The beauty of a wireless internet connection is that I can sit out in the screened in porch and work. There is constant, and joyous, distraction from passing breezes, birds, Attila chatting from over at the wood shed, and a steady parade of vehicles passing as weekend visitors set out on their journey home.
It has been another fine day we have gotten ourselves into!
Worldly Distractions
Weather
25C
Condition: Mainly Sunny
Pressure: 102.0 kPa
Visibility: 16 km
Temperature: 24.6°C
Dewpoint: 0.7°C
Humidity: 20%
Wind: SW 18 km/h
Quote
And to further the “we” that means “me” theme:
“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.”
Harry S Truman
1884 – 1972
This wireless connectivity is truly wonderful. First I had a cell phone and to tell the truth I never used it except at home (!) because I was so conditioned to the wired landline. I still remember the first time it rang when I was driving–I was so startled I nearly ran into a ditch.
Now, I can’t imagine being without it. Not that I use it all that much for phone calls–I hate talking on the phone–but it is my emergency contact and it has all those other apps I use all the time. It saved my life the one time my car died, in the dark, in the fast lane of the freeway. If I hadn’t been able to call 911 from the safety of my car, well, all those ugly scenarios can be imagined.
Now I’m gradually getting used to using my laptop around my house and in my yard (being dive bombed by hummers) and I’ve taken it to Starbuck’s where I can use their free wi-fi. Turns out my church has wi-fi connectivity also–the password is pretty obvious and we are allowed to use it.
So there’s another kind of freedom. It gives writing and communicating a whole different context when you’re released from the confines of house and office.
P.S. I didn’t mention it before, but glad to hear that you have 5 hour workdays coming up. Yay!
LOL Sarah, dive bombing hummers! The prettiest visitor to our deck lately was a crow, attracted by the shiny metal dustpan I had set out to dry, after cleaning the masonry heater with it.
That sounds pretty scary, sitting in the dark, stopped in the fast lane on a freeway! Like you, we do not use our cellphone very much, except for emergencies, and when we are staying at our little house in the city, where we have no telephone or wireless or cable. It is an old phone, purchased in 2006 I think, and doesn’t do much besides telephone calls. I did take pictures with it once, but could not get them transferred to anything else, not even by email. We put $100 on it about once a year, so it is costing us very little for an emergency cellphone.
The MacBook Air has completely charmed me, I don’t go anywhere without it now. Light, and powerful, it runs a lot of my most used software, like my genealogy software, Dreamweaver and Graphic Converter.