Photoshop for Dummies

Here's what I made at my Photoshop class tonight:



This may not look like much, but it started out as four different pictures, and I combined them into one four-layered picture, wait, five-layered picture (the words make their own layer, don't I sound smart, yeah, right). I also cropped, selected, filtered, rotated, and a whole bunch of other fun verbs that I now cannot recall, these picture items to create the one "lovely" picture item you see above.

Yeah, so why did I think Photoshop was hard? Oh, yeah, because 1) my boss insisted that he did not have time to show me how to edit text in ads he made using Photoshop and 2) my boyfriend insisted he didn't have time to show me how to manipulate and edit pictures using Photoshop.

That's what I get for listening to them instead of to myself. Myself was all, "Naomi, you can totally do Photoshop without a class, girl," and I was all, "I don't know, Mike and Glenn don't think I can..."

So there were these old ladies in my class and most of Monday night was spent explaining to them where the pictures go when you transfer them from your camera to your computer; and how to rename a file and such things like that. But I did learn some useful things that the men in my life (i.e. boss and boyfriend) are just too swamped to show me, so it wasn't all for naught.

So now I will go kick some Photoshop ass. Or, at least, edit some Photoshop files at work and create some Photoshop files for Mike's work...

My Artist made the Front Page

Mike was on the front page of one of the local papers here on Monday, and now the front page is on the side of our fridge:



They got his name wrong though (they printed it as "Warren Lake") so now we call him The Artist Formerly Known as Mike Warren, or TAFKAMW (we also think Warren Lake makes a great hippie name):



This glass layout, called a rollup, was designed and created by hand by Mike:



Edited 2/28 to add the text of the feature (it wasn't really an article, so much as a photographic feature with picture captions - here are the picture captions):

TOP: The Glass Station artist Warren Lake uses a high-temperature torch to melt colored glass into a great white shark's head as another torch keeps the glass reef pedestal (upon which the shark will stand) hot.

LEFT: The Glass Station co-owner and artist Joseph Reinik holds a finished vase created with colorful glass pieces fused onto and melted around it. He and his partner in the Blue Lake business, Scott Harris, each have about 10 years experience working with glass. Reinik recently finished a class from a master glass sculptor.

BELOW: An assortment of colorful items that have been handmade ahead of time are sometimes heated and then fused onto and melted around molten glass to make a vase with multidimensional features instead of just flat layers.

Day 11 of the Flu

So, it's not pinkeye, and it's not the Humboldt Crud. It's the flu. According to the news, there is a flu epidemic (or is pandemic?) going on in 45 states right now, and the hospitals are full. This isn't that 24-hour flu that is nasty as all get-out and then you move on with your life. No, siree. This is the THREE-WEEK flu that is nasty as all get-out, and then in your weakened state you stagger on with your life.

So I have been wanting to lose some weight, but this isn't exactly what I had in mind.

Last week I went to exactly one day of work. So far this week, I've been to work one day as well, which is not exactly a good track record (nor is it my norm). Monday morning I felt OK, but by the afternoon my splitting headache and my ringing ears and my firey sore throat feeling like I was trying to choke down a tennis ball every time I swallowed (which is, like, a lot, we swallow a lot, you might not notice unless your throat hurts for six days straight) should have been a clue that I needed to call it a day. I forced myself to suffer through the day, went to my first Photoshop class that I have already paid for and was so excited about, and then Tuesday I paid for it, all day. Today, I'm significantly better than yesterday, but I think I need to not push myself. Which means, I'm working on getting to work, so I can acoomplish something, but taking a shower and getting dressed caused me to lie down and take an hour nap. It's pathetic.

I actually had one of our board members telling me Monday that I wasn't taking this flu seriously enough. Because I was at work. Um, we are four 1/2 weeks to this festival, and I haven't even gotten the vendor contracts out the the door yet. I'm trying to take it all seriously. This is just the worst timing ever.

So, anyway. I don't have the Humboldt Crud. Which is like, yay for me, I guess. Apparently it's a rite of passage or so the crazy locals say. As I've never had it, I wouldn't know if it's preferred to this flu crap that I have, but I'm seriously thinking that anything would be better than this. Definitely melodramatic, i.e. me.

Also, now that I have read that the easiest way to catch the flu is by touching your mouth and face with dirty hands, I am hyper aware of the fact that I touch my face a lot. I also wash my hands a lot, but all it takes is one time with not-so-clean hands. And my computer at work is not exactly just used by me. It's like the town bicycle of computers. So now I get to be obsessed about yet another thing. Awesome.

P.S. As I cited no sources for this little epi(or pan)demic, just type "flu current" into your search engine and you'll see what I'm talking about. Or you can just take my word for it.

P.P.S. OK, here is one link: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/usmap.htm - the states in brown mean the flu is widespread there. As you can see, Florida is currently the place to be.

On a better note

Mike and I celebrated our togetherness by him making his disgusting pinkeye girlfriend a lovely eggs, facon (that's fake bacon, it's quite good), and toast breakfast; and then sitting down together and writing a new goals list for 2008. It feels good to be a team. It feels a little bit like we're Bonnie and Clyde, but without the criminal part.

We also decided that we would celebrate our anniversary again/better/for real on March 12, when our Humboldt life together officially started. The hope is that by then I won't have [pinkeye, mumps, scarlet fever, insert obscure illness here].

Also, Mike brought me this herbal remedy called "Miracle 3000" or something like that, and he insists that a) it works, and b) I will take it at least 3 times a week so that I can stop being such a sicky.

True love in all its glory.

Awesome

The eye goo situation is now happening in both eyes. According to my medical book and my boyfriend's reaction, it's pinkeye.

Have I mentioned yet how much fun I am having?

Hi, I'm five years old apparently, and therefore I have pinkeye.

The Crud

I think I have the Humboldt Crud. I have been sick for almost a week. It started out as the body ache, fever, flu yuckiness, and then segued seamlessly into the horribly sore throat, hacking cough, snot nose, headachy, earachy cocktail that I am currently enjoying.

Sorry to paint such a lovely picture.

I am so sick and tired of being sick and tired. With Monday being a holiday, I called in sick to work Tuesday and Wednesday, went to work on Thursday, and got sent back home with orders not to come back on Friday.

I've never had that happen before.

I never thought I'd miss the days of the good ol' 24-hour-bug. I mean, it was hardcore, but just when you thought you couldn't take it anymore, you got better.

I am so bored/lonely/tired/over this crap.

Now today my eye decided that it wanted to join the party and started oozing copious amounts of eye goo. Just my right eye though. Yes, eye goo is the technical term. I might be dying.

OK, I'm not dying. It's just the crud. Yay, Humboldt.

Happy Anniversary

Tommorrow, Saturday, February 23, Mike and I will have been together for a year.

Wednesday, March 12, I will have been here in Humboldt County for a year.

And for your viewing pleasure, this is yours truly, as drawn by 10-year-old Kaya:


She made me with green eyes because initially she didn't have a brown marker, but as I did not want green hair, I searched around the house until I found her a brown marker. Whew, that was a close one.

P.S. The kids got Presidents Week off! California is crazy!

Edited to add a picture of the little artist herself, hard at work:

Don't Worry About a Thing

This has been hanging out in my favorites for a year or so; I thought I'd share it here. A very cute little boy serenades us with Bob Marley's Three Little Birds.

Enjoy!

Thanks to the Presidents...

Is this a normal thing, because I don't remember it ever happening in Wisconsin? I get a paid holiday from work today because it's Presidents Day today.

I am sick anyway, got some stupid flu-like bug, so I guess the presidents, or whoever decided to give me this day off, saved me a sick call into the office...

Online Glass Art Gallery

Click HERE to check out Mike's gallery on glassartists.org.

The URL is glassartists.org/MikeWarren, FYI.

I will be working on getting more pictures on here every few days or so, so check back in periodically. This is just the tip of the iceberg, y'all.

Edited to add some pictures, in case you need some inspiration to click my link, you won't regret it, I promise!





And there are plenty more where these came from!

On Love, Random Stranger Style

A man who appeared to have all of his worldly possessions with him in a shopping cart handed me a photocopy of this poem, handwritten on a plain white sheet of paper, as I walked by on my way to the post office:


Love and marriage,
Love and marriage
go together
like a horse and carriage,
This I tell you brother,
You can't have one
without the other.


I couldn't tell if it was the Frank Sinatra version or the theme song from the sitcom Married with Children, though I can't see how that really makes a difference. I guess I appreciate the sentiment? I can't help but wonder what made him choose this poem to photocopy and hand out to passersby. I also can't help but wonder if he handed out his little marriage poem to men too. Maybe I have been proposed to and I don't even know it!

Well, at the very least, I now know this random stranger's opinion on love, AND marriage. And I'm glad too.

'08 is Great

What's New:

Seven weeks to the jazz festival, and still lots and lots to do.

Taking a photoshop class at College of the Redwoods starting February 25.

Volunteering/working in trade for glass classes doing office work at the hot glass studio where Mike works. First glass class will be end of this month, on a Saturday. I will try to make something cool.

Being "stepmom" on the weekends to 10-year-old Kaya and 12-year-old Josh, having all kinds of fun times, including baking cookies, having snow fights*, racing to the end of the street, learning hot glass techniques at their dad's shop, watching movies like Madagascar and Open Season, having sleepovers camp-out style on the living room floor, and other bonding-like moments.

Working on getting Mike's artwork up on various glass artist websites, will post links when I'm done.

Planning a trip home to Wisconsin some time in late April/early May, details to follow once airline tickets are bought and vacation time at work is approved, not in that particular order (vacation time is unofficially approved, but not the specific dates yet).

*For the record, it only snowed here that one day. Yes, I'm bragging a little. You all have each other, albeit having each other in 10 feet of snow. Two thousand miles away from my beloved family, I have to hold on to whatever I can, so I will "brag" about the fact that there is no snow here. Ha ha. And I'm sorry. I hope you all are being safe and staying warm.

Camping out:



Hanging out at the glass studio:



Playing with puppies:

It's Snowing in "Paradise"

Yeah, so Sunday it snowed enough for the kids and me to have a snowball fight, and I don't mean like a sorry excuse for a snowball fight either. It was a full fledged down and dirty knock 'em out snowball fight. And those of you who know me realize this means that it was a completely unfair fight that I only didn't lose because 1) I know how to outrun Kaya and Josh on slippery ground and 2) I used my umbrella as a shield.

It snowed for much of the day and the snow actually stuck. I'm pretty certain I was the only person in the entire town of Blue Lake, where one of Mike's glass studios is, who had an actual ice/snow scraper in the trunk of my car. Yeah, everybody was jealous. Everybody was also making a very big deal out of it, like they had never seen snow before in their lives. While I appreciate that Josh and Kaya, who have lived in Humboldt County for most and all of their lives respectively, don't recall ever having seen it in person, my being from Wisconsin sort of colored my personal experience. Let's just say I wasn't too pumped on the snow situation. Especially since Saturday was warm enough for no coats! It's like the weather taunted us with what it could be like, and then BAM! SNOW. Ew.

Yesterday it alternated between sun and rain, no snow that I can tell, but looking up in the mountains I can see they have been dumped on with snow up there, and the weather forecast has predicted that the mountaintop communities should expect another eight inches today/tonight! That is a lot for around here. Heck, I think that's a lot for anywhere.

OK, apparently, I'm a snow scrooge. Whatever. Mike scolded his kids for getting all wet playing in the snow and then being cold because they didn't have the proper winter wear, and I stuck up for them: "They are just kids. None of us knew to have proper winter wear because it hasn't snowed here in years." Yeah, OK, he said. And then we went home and huddled under blankets with cups of hot chocolate and watched The Family Guy. The way it should be on a snowy day.

Three, Count 'em, Three Excellent Things About Today

1) I have Fridays off so I get to do fun things like rearrange my living room and clean stuff and run important errands (well, rearranging my living room is fun).
2) The sun is out! And there's no wind, so it feels like almost 50 degrees! I had the front door open while I cleaned this morning and I was only wearing a teeshirt (and pants) and wasn't cold at all!
3) I bought a couch on Craigslist (for cheap!) on Wednedsay and Mike helped me move the living room around today and now my apartment is finally cute and comfortably livable!
4) I know I said three but I just thought of another thing! I have the internet at home now! That could also be bad.

Yay!

Here are some pictures of my insanely tiny but (finally!) cute apartment:












The outside still needs a little work, but...




Here's where my car is parked, next to the barn where the cows hang out:


Edited 1.19.08 to add a few more pics:





Trying to keep the main living area warm with a space heater, these are the doors to the bathroom, our bedroom, the linen closet (uber skinny door) and the "spare" bedroom (aka walk-in closet). I just thought it looked sort of cool:

(The angle is from sitting at our little eating "nook".)

Hope you enjoyed this episode of our tiny adorable apartment as much as I do.

OK, fine, here's what I have to say about my stupid hamster

I wrote this yesterday:

My two-year-old dwarf hamster, Smalls, died. I think he got too cold. Or maybe two years is his life expectancy. I have no idea. All I know is that I fed him and gave him water and tried not to hate the boring little sucker too much, and then yesterday amidst my running around between work and errands and life, it suddenly occurred to me that his food bowl, which usually remains empty, not because I don't feed him but because he eats his food the second it hits his bowl, was the same level it had been for days, and his water too. Suddenly I'm driving down the road about to pick up a sofa I purchased off Craigslist with my borrowed SUV and I have this thought: My Hamster Has Died.

I got home, moved the couch in, made some dinner, it was late and I was hungry, had a beer, it was late and I had been working all day, and then... I couldn't stall anymore. I took off his lid and yelled and rattled his food bowl. The little bugger always comes out when I call to him.

He didn't come out.

I found him curled up in a tight little ball in the corner under his bedding. The poor little thing just curled up and died. I feel like a terrible hamster mother. I didn't even much like him, because he's a poor replacement for the dogs in my life I've had to let go as relationships come and go, he just eats and smells funny and bites me. I usually called him whatever random name that came to mind and occasionally I would reach in and pet his back while he was eating and too preoccupied to pull away and turn his sharp little choppers on me.

But when I found him curled up there I cried. OK? I cried for my dumb little hamster and my apparent inability to keep even a dumb little hamster alive.

My sweetest ever boyfriend held me and didn't make fun of me even once. He said it was OK to feel sad because it was my pet and a life and I was taking care of him. He said he probably died of old age. Or coldness. But that it wasn't my fault.

You know, the sweet things good boyfriends say when their girlfriends are sad.

He also said we'll give Hammy a proper burial in the redwoods.

I feel so sad, relieved, guilty, and curious. I just hope he didn't suffer too much. I hope it was his time to go, that he died of old age, and that he was remotely happy in his short meaningless little life.

RIP, Smalls, April 2006-January 2008. I will miss you when I think of you. You didn't even eat all your gourmet hamster food I bought you, you little punk. I'm glad I didn't let Mike feed you to the owl that lives in the barn by our house.

The details of this post are peculiar.

President Clinton came to town yesterday. He spoke to the 400 "elite" people of Humboldt County, whomever that may be (in this case it was the 400 people who managed to fit into the building). Most of the thousands of people who waited for hours in the cold went home dissatisfied.

I spent my evening purchasing a couch for my living room (finally!) and transporting it home. Although it would have been nice to catch a glimpse of the celebrity that is Bill Clinton, I have a fair-weather interest, and that means taking off half a day's work to wait in the very cold wind for hours on end only to have to either push my way in or to have waited in vain did not fit within the parameters of my curiosity.

Some people would call that lazy. I would call it smart.

In other news, the worst part about this week is that my hamster died, and the best part about today is that I brought my super comfortable office chair from home into work and it is awesome.

Humboldt Has a Visitor

Former President Clinton may or may not be coming to Eureka tomorrow to advocate for his wife, but I can neither confirm nor deny this is true.

I will have to get back to you. (I just think this is interesting because Humboldt is so rural and off the map in so many ways.)

The Crazy Weather

Here it is raining and storming so much that many people (last I heard on the radio, 1/2 a million in California alone) are without electricity. I'm not one of those people. But I feel for those who are affected by this.

Back in Wisconsin there was a 50-car pile-up on I-90 because of the intense fog, combined with the snowy weather conditions.

Here they warn you not to leave your house if you don't really have to on account of the pouring rain. Being one who drove on a regular basis in snow back home in Wisconsin, I thought this was being a bit overly cautious. But the climate here seems to lend itself to ultra slick roads when it's raining a lot. So it's really not a whole lot different than driving in the snow. Combine that with the fog. The fog here is intense.

I hope everyone is being careful. The forces that be are beyond our control. Respect the weather. That's my hippy dippy speech of the day. I won't call it Mother Nature, OK, but just respect it. The road by my house was closed last week for a little while because the river jumped the bridge. The (happy) cows by my house could go swimming if they wanted. Somehow I don't think they want to go swimming.

My Monday workday is over now so I am going home. Today the weather was so strange that I didn't know if I should bring my sunglasses or my umbrella. By the end of the day I had used both interchangeably. Never a dull weather moment here.

P.S. Snow may be cold, but you can't go sledding in the rain, you can't go ice skating in the rain, or skiing in the rain. My BF likes to say you don't have to shovel the rain off the car, but I'm cooped up inside a lot, and right about now I think I could go for a little bit of snow. At least snow is fun. Cute umbrellas and rain boots lose their appeal pretty quickly.

A Bloggy Year in Review

I borrowed this idea from my friend's blog (the word blog came from "web log" and then was shortened over time); she borrowed it from some other blog she reads.

The idea is that you take the first sentence or two from the first post of each month and that is a [hopefully] interesting way to sum up the year. (Sometimes I had to take a tad more than that for the sentences to make any sense at all; my mother never accused me of being pithy, folks!)

I didn't start this blog until I moved to California which was in March. But that's close enough:

MARCH
Driving to Cali took 3 days-ish from Friday night to Monday night. We slept in the car for a few hours Friday night/Saturday morning 130AMish to 530AMish, drove all day Saturday, stopped Saturday night @ Little America, Wyoming, less than an hour from the Nevada border...

APRIL
Sunday the weather was beautiful. It was sunny and warm and amazing. I packed us a couple sandwiches, one PB and honey on this really good 9-grain-or-something bread that Mike likes and one mild cheddar cheese and cut them in half and wrapped them up and put them in my shoulder bag. That was a really long run-on sentence. But anyway.

Then Mike and I put on our walking shoes and walked. We walked down the big hill, past the grocery store, turned into a residential area and walked about four more blocks to the Sequoia Park Zoo! It's a very tiny, charming, free zoo with amazing scenery of lots of huge trees and trees full of flowers and foliage and of course animals!

MAY
My plates have expired on my Nissan. This means I have to go get California plates now. I wonder if I could get a vanity plate that says Made in WI. I wonder if I would really want to do that. I'm rather proud of Wisconsin and always have been.

JUNE
I got another job!

JULY
Well, Hayley and Dan are back at home. They left yesterday on a red-eye home to good ol' Wisconsin. I was very sad to see them go, but relieved that they got on the plane without a hassle.

AUGUST
Today, we signed an apartment lease! So regardless of my homesickness, I'm here for at least another year. We are moving into our new apartment, in Bayside, this weekend.

In other news, Mike and I are going to make a road trip as soon as time permits. Mike has been doing really well making aquarium scenes and butterfly garden scenes in glass, and his latest is jellyfish. Those things are so popular. We are going to drive up the coast and sell them as we go.

SEPTEMBER
OK so I have finally moved. It has taken much longer than we had anticipated and hoped. But now it is done (except for all the unpacking but we are working on that day by day, slowly but surely).

OCTOBER
Two Weird Things About Yesterday:
1) The internet went down in the entire county.
2) There was a 100% chance of rain according to the forecast for yesterday and it didn't rain at all.

NOVEMBER
In the past three-ish weeks I have:
*quit my job
*started a different job
*unpacked a lot more boxes
*got rid of stuff I don't need
*cleaned a lot
*rode my bicycle a significant amount
*read a lot
*worked on growing my hair
*sang to music and danced around my house
*went for loooong walks at the marsh and by my house - it's been so strangely warm
*mostly worked a lot as job transitioning is really energy- and time-consuming

DECEMBER
It started on Saturday. The wind has been blowing so hard that it sounds like waves crashing outside my window while I try to sleep at night. I live close to the ocean but not THAT close.

Well, that's it. Though I do think some of my best work was in the two months (March and April) that I was unemployed and had nothing better to do than think up things to post on my blog. As fun as that is, it doesn't appear to support the hobby of living. So what that means is that anyone still reading this blog by now is suffering in agony at how downhill it has gone, but I do have a bit more of a life than when my blog was really good. Maybe one day I'll learn how to balance the two.

Then again, probably not.

A Year Change is a Natural Time to Reflect

So here are my lists off the top of my head:

THINGS I'M PROUD OF:
*moved 2000 miles out of my comfort zone to try something completely different
*have stuck out the hard parts of the above decision and have been rewarded for it
*earned not one but two good jobs in a really tough local job market
*successfully negotiated a job that has only been temporary in the entire 20-year history of the organization into a permanent one on my terms

THINGS I'M NOT SO PROUD OF:
*haven't talked to my older sister since moving away
*don't call my family often enough
*wasn't able to handle tough situations with former roommates as well as I would have liked (though I do feel I did the best I could at the time)
*still trying to break that impulsive nature of mine: impulse buying (Can you say Us Weekly - EW!), impulse moving across the country, impulse eating a pizza when I'm supposedly trying to eat healthier (oh, but see now I can add "being able to admit my weaknesses" to the "things I'm proud of" list!)

MOVIES I SAW IN THE THEATRE (this would be a "best of", except that these are the only two movies I saw in the theatre in 2007):
*Across the Universe
*Pirates of the Caribbean 3

BEST OF THE MOVIES I RENTED:
*Waking Life
*A Hard Day's Night
*Pink Floyd's The Wall
*Fast Food Nation (OK, this is debatable, but it IS the last movie I rented in 2007)
*The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Mos Def = Ford Prefect = awesome)

BEST OF THE BOOKS I READ:
*The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
*The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
*Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
*How I Became Stupid by Martin Page

BEST OF THE BOOKS I REREAD:
*Chocolat by Joanne Harris

BEST OF THE NEW (to me) MUSIC I HEARD:
*Cat Power
*TV on the Radio

MY ALBUMS OF THE YEAR:
*Across the Universe Original Movie Soundtrack, Deluxe Edition
*Joyful Sign by Girlyman

How about you? How was your 2007?