Mosaic Progress

Today I came home from work feeling rather ill. I think it's just stress. Eventually stress starts to mess up my stomach and I get digestive problems. I crawled in bed with the heating pad and slept most of the afternoon. That helped, somewhat.

Still, I only did a small amount of work on the mosaic - not enough to be worth the effort of photographing it and posting the photo (especially since my internet connection is so very slow tonight). I worked on the smaller sunflowers. I have all the greenery done - there's just the five bees and a couple flower blossoms and then the filling in of the sky, which should go quickly. The tile I ordered for it should be here on Monday.

Instead of working on the mosaic I worked on developing an events calendar that I can drop into a post or the sidebar of a Blogger blog. It's for another project I am researching.

More later.

Canon PowerShot SD1100

I have been trying to do a daily photo blog but I am constantly falling behind because of a camera issue that I keep trying to deal with. I have a Canon digital SLR, but sometimes its just too damn big and heavy to take with me. Plus it was fairly expensive to buy (good old student loans!) and I have a couple really expensive lenses. I really have to be motivated to take it out with me, and often when I do, it gets left in the car.

I decided to get a pocketable camera. Abelisto & I went to Best Buy to see what was available. I ended up getting a brown Canon PowerShot. I like my big Canon, it had good specs, good reputation and it was reasonably priced. I am really into brown right now and the fact that they had the brown one in stock clinched the deal. It is actually a rich dark brown, like expensive cocoa, not the muddy taupe color of this image...


When we got home with it I discovered that that Mike & Nova have the same camera (theirs isn't brown though...).

The battery is charging. In a little while I will go out and test it.

New Blog Design

I just did a major redesign of this blog. I wanted it to more closely match my website. The redesign involved hacking the Blogger template.

I need to be able to do this for the various blogs that my co-workers create for the university. I had tried before but was not too successful at actually modifying the template (instead of just changing colors and fonts) until I found some excellent guidelines provided by Amanda Fazani of BloggerBuster. Now I need to take a look at all the blogs I manage and assist with for the university.

This is the fun part of my job.

Over my lunch hour I might play with different colors for borders and text. Or maybe not...

Winona Daily Foto Blog

Started another blog. The new one is a photo blog:
Winona Daily Foto - Taking Everyday Photographs of Winona Minnesota.
The plan is to post a photo taken in Winona every day, photos either taken by me or sent to me by others.

I think I will like doing this photo diary, but I may want to get a small point-and-shoot digital camera to make it easier and more spontaneous. I have a Canon digital SLR and it is too heavy and awkward to carry around for those spur-of-the-moment shots - not to mention too expensive to risk on the bicycle...

Abelisto and I are thinking about getting a Digital Camcorder to do some video blogging . Abelisto is doing sustainable beekeeping and currently is documenting the process with still images and text. Some of what he is doing would be great videos.

On the Edge of Anger

Thought I would change the colors on the blog and see if it increased my motivation to blog. How strange it is to feel guilty over not blogging. Add one more thing to fret over. Messy house, bad eating habits, forgetting/avoiding exercise, browsing the net while at work (okay, this one is not a problem, I am supposed to look at websites now and then...), forgetting to check my bank balance before deciding to buy something, Now I can add not blogging to the list.

I am finding myself on the edge of anger more often nowadays. Mostly an unspecific anger which makes it hard to combat. I think it is a number of things:

the kids are being particularly aggravating these days;
the website redesign (at work) seems to be ending up as one giant hurry-up-and-wait project where things are becoming a jumbled mass of other people's agendas and not the team's;
and the fucking housing market fell apart just when we were reaching a point where we might sell this huge house.

I really do feel like it is nearly a sin (and I do not actually believe in sin, per se) to have 3 people living in a 3000 sq. ft. house. This house could house a community of 6 - 8 like-minded adults, or a family of 8, if there were families that big. I guess there are still families that size, but I do not know of any who would buy the house.

Having this much room has given me more studio room, and it is great for gatherings - last fall we had a party with 30 or so people attending and no one said it was too crowded.

Today Abelisto and I did our shopping on the bicycles (first time out on the bikes this spring - that's another thing, this winter seems to be hanging on tooth-and-nail up here in Minnesota, I am so sick of winter), and we saw a man working on the roof of a house near ours. I circled back around and asked him if he did roofs or if he was the homeowner. He said he did roofs on the side and we asked him to come look at ours. We told him about the bees, and the fact that we would only be doing sections of the roof, and he was fine with that. He said he would contact us in about a week to take a look at the roof and give us an estimate. I hope we can afford him, otherwise I will be doing the roof myself. I know I can do it, I just do not know if I want to tackle a job that big.

**********************************************************