June 2008 Archives

A few weeks ago while Mom and I were putting together a slide show for Dad's 70th birthday, I was poking around on Amazon for some appropriate tunes. On a whim, I searched for The Irish Rovers. I didn't expect to find anything, because this record has always been my first search on a new music service, so of course I'd looked for it back when Amazon first introduced MP3 downloads. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that they'd be adding to their offerings.... (Duh!)

Anyhow, yeah, I downloaded the whole album. And yeah, I've been tooling around town singing along (southern girl + no ear for languages + overdose of the Irish Rovers = "unicairns", apparently) unashamedly. Well, maybe a little ashamedly. But not enough to stop :-)

So, here's a link to the sound of my happy childhood! I had to pick one song (oh, the agony!) which really isn't fair, but this is one I find myself singing in the shower, so I figure it's a good representative choice. I'm not sure I know anybody besides my dad who will enjoy this as much as I do, but I still feel compelled to share....

I'm relaxing today, making scrapbook pages from some recent pictures. I read about Adobe's Kuler in the latest issue of Digital Scrapbooking, and decided to go check it out. One of things you can do is point it at a flickr picture, and it will generate a set of colors that go with that picture.

So I gave it this picture:

and it generated these colors:

Cool!!

I used the RGB values from that in FotoFusion to make this page:

I LOVE THE INTERNET!!!

I've been awake since 4 and up since 5 for a meeting that doesn't start til 9. Time zones are not my friend this morning. Anyhow.... It's hot out here. Isn't California supposed to be nice and cool? (Aside from Sacramento, that is. I learned that lesson.) It feels just like what I left behind in Houston, except earlier.

I ended up sitting next to an off-duty pilot on the flight out here, and I got the window for the first time in ages, so I got some running commentary on landmarks. He said he'd starting flying when he was 13, and the lady on the other side of him and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows and laughed. I know I was wondering if Continental hires pilots who aren't old enough to drink yet, and she just shook her head and said, "Everybody looks so young to me these days."

Appropriately enough, I'm reading an old (1943) history book about the westward expansion to California, and I laughed out loud when I read this passage:

"The Californians were of two factions, a revolution having occurred just a few months before. (California revolution: by proclamation. No unthrifty waste of gunpowder, no indecorous blood-letting, just some heroic marching and a fierce barrage of rhetoric....)"

The whole book is salted with such commentary, and while a lot of it goes over my head because I'm not familiar with all the political ins-and-outs of the time, some of it is very funny. It's more like reading a (really long) newspaper than what I think of as a "history book."

And with that, I'm off to find breakfast and meet some Californians....

More fun with flickr toys! This is the Warholizer, using one slightly out-of-focus red rose.

1. Gems, 2. Gems, 3. Gems, 4. Gems

How gorgeous is all that?! A few weeks ago when the MO was out of town on business, I was clicking through tv channels and happened across something called Jewelry TV.... Oh my. If they had been selling their finished jewelry at that point, all this could have been avoided, because I wouldn't have looked twice, but no, they had to be selling loose gemstones. Really yummy ones. In grab bags.... So yeah, I caved. AND I'M SO GLAD I WAS WEAK.

I've finished scanning cousin Rocky's scrapbook. Full scoop is here.