Published

I am opening this post with a picture of my kitten, Dukat a.ka. Duky and Katzy :)


Bigger view of Katzy at DA

Yesterday I received my copy of of a Photoshop resources book and cd compilation from a Japanese publisher who I was in contact with this year. I'm quite pleased to see my Photoshop patterns (seamless tiles) look pretty good in there- although I did make the effort to provide them with a better resolution to use than what I originally posted online.

Essentially the book is a collection of really nice samples of digital resources created by the artistic community (not all of whom use Photoshop as their main tool of choice- such as myself) that can be used primarily with Photoshop; name the patterns and brushes but there are also over 200 jpg images that can be used with any software.

I am a specialist in making patterns for Photoshop and the irony is that they are made with a competing product- Corel Draw and Photopaint. Both programs have their merits. Photoshop brushes and patterns are more user friendly and apply more smoothly but the program is awkward to learn and really expensive whereas Corel software is far easier to learn and cheaper but has way more rough edges that should have been fixed A DECADE AGO.

On another subject, my hubby got commissioned to write several articles for the upcoming season in the world of shooting sports publications and I am very happy for him and us.


bigger view at DA of Flower Triptych


Bigger view of Dogwood Nursery at DA

Our garden is doing well and hopefully before fall we can still get a fruit tree for the front yard but there is so much other stuff that needs to be done I am not counting on it anymore. But if we do it will either be an ornamental cherry, apricot (iffy, I know) or a (dessert) plum. My sis and I were in Kelowna last week checking out Bylands and Dogwood Nurserys and surprisingly Dogwood had better selection but then they are slightly off the beaten path. It will probably be next year the way I'm waffling!

We watched the fireworks display on July first at the park. The volunteer people were a bit silly:

Just here :)

And finally I will close with an image of the beautiful poppies that are finally blooming after all the regular ornamentals have started to fade. My ambition is actually to grow all kinds of poppies as my main decorative flowers along with cornflowers and large daisys...a bit American in colour scheme but so what- red, white and blue make a good colour mix.


Bigger View of Papaver Somniferum at DA

Summer

Summer is here with a vengeance.
After a cold winter followed by somewhat less cold days and the occasional rain storm that passed for spring we are now baking in 35 degree weather. We've also had lightning storms the past week which ignited forest fires in the surrounding area. The current conditions make it very risky if you live in these parts and your home is located on a forested hillside that is peppered with just as many pine beetle ridden trees ( dead trees ) as green Ponderosas.
Fortunately Merritt is doing alright with just a few small fires that I heard of. Kelowna, which is about 125km east of us, had entire neighborhoods evacuated because of fire.

Smoke on the connector coming in from Kelowna

I don't mind the heat because we have air conditioning in the house for which I am so grateful- it allows me to work very hard outside in the garden...which is far from what it should be. We talked to a contractor and just to have the top soil removed and carted away was estimated at 4 hours of work at close to 500 dollars. We have a small lot that is full of all kinds of grass and weed- mostly weed which forms a dense network of tangled roots. My husband and I have been manually pulling it out with a pick axe and I think we are going to finish it this way rather than go with the contractor.

Classic cracking in hot weather!

Now that he is almost totally recovered it will go faster with two of us working on it...it turns out that it was not a broken blood vessel that caused his nose bleed- it was a major artery that runs alongside the brow bone. I suppose such a thing is easy to misdiagnose when the doctor on call only spends a few minutes with you and there's no one around who checks to see how much blood the patient has already lost. :\

Anyway, we also made a gym in the back of the house. This is something I've always wanted- a place to do pull ups, legs stretches etc.I don't have much upper body strength and now I can build it up again without having to fork out for a gym membership. It's basically wooden closet rods suspended on fence posts set in concrete blocks- very sturdy and most importantly, private. :)
And in all this we are trying to quit smoking again...down to half a pack a day from a full pack but it varies...the struggle goes on!

Heavy wind blowing the crud from the mill north

On the photography front I intend to expand to do weddings and portraiture. I went to the Community Futures Office in Merritt to find out anything I could about starting a business and was sent some literature via e-mail on what steps I would need to take and what steps I should take. I will be creating a web identity to reflect this and will advertise it under my own name I think...my current web site is undergoing an overhaul as I hit an obstacle with my image server that could only be solved with rather drastic steps.
On the bright side of that it will give me more of a reason to update this blog! As I get my galleries back on-line I will update so anyone who is particularly fond of a certain type of photograph may very well find it via the search engines.

Art Show

My hubby went turkey hunting this past weekend and I drove him out to Kelowna to meet with his buddy Dave and then picked him up on Sunday and even helped close down the show at the civic center. He and Dave didn't get anything but they saw an immense amount of wildlife; whitetail, mule deer, intermixed deer, bear, turkeys etc. They stayed at a place called Parklane Resort which is in Christina Lake which Othmar has only good things to say about although the town shut up tighter than a clam in the evenings.



I should mention that we took the long way to Kelowna but nothing came up in the way of wildlife but that one goose that we saw on our trip to Osoyoos was back again in that Osprey's nest. How bizarre- that's a long drop down for her chicks if she hatches eggs way up there on a telephone pole. As my sister would say: "It's nature's way of weeding out the gene pool!"

Meanwhile, we had our May Art Show and Sale at the local civic center in Merritt last weekend and now all the art has been moved to the Courthouse Gallery for the next month. It was a really beautiful set up with all kinds of art from traditional to digital represented. A lot of work went into the set up- hanging and placing it all, getting the piano and musicians in, decorating the place etc. The end result was probably a bit of an eye opener for the attendees who probably think of Merritt less an artistic community than an agricultural one.




I've only put two pieces in the show- both pen and ink from quite a few years back. It's probably high time I started back with that kind of drawing since I quite like it.



Bigger view At DA



Bigger View At DA

Speaking of art; I plan on going to Vancouver next week to the Vancouver Art Gallery there which has a whole bunch of the Dutch Master's painting on exhibition in a loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. My sister told me about it and my brother as well who wants to go. Speaking of him, he just got Skype installed which, if you don't know, is (currently) a free long distance phone service that runs over the computer! Un-effing-believable. Not only is it (currently) still free it is also very user friendly and installed without a single, solitary glitch. The first program I ever used that had a 100% perfect installation and works without any problems.

There's a few other things I want to write about but I will leave it to a later post- our little adventure today, plans for my web site, issues that are bugging me on certain web sites etc. Hope folks had as good a week end as I did!