This daisy fainted face-first. Some days it's just like that....
July 2008 Archives
CATDIP V is finally underway.... This time around we're doing album covers for imaginary bands. The original picture for the first round was already manipulated--Mom put a tabby cat in her pantry. The theme was Religion, so I invented Pantry Cat and Teh Cookie Kitteh Choir. I found some wig images to cut out to give Teh Kittehs some style, a song for them to sing, and away we went.
I drew the text and scanned it into GIMP, and then used the bitmap tracing tool in Inkscape to make pngs. (That was new for me, and SO EASY! I am going to experiment so more with that on more complex line-art scans and see how it goes. I'm hoping it's a good solution, because I really hate doing the magic wand/eraser stuff just to try to get a good black-and-white image.) I used kuler to pick the background and text colors and then just fiddled with the layout til I got tired of messing with it ;-)
All in all, I'm very pleased.
Click through the image to flickr for credits and more details.
We got sucked into Nan's last weekend and bought four, count 'em four! new games. Well, one of them is the Traders & Barbarians expansion for Settlers, so maybe that sorta kinda doesn't count.... At any rate, I never can resist a game, and the MO was in an acquisitive mood as well, so we came home with the aforementioned Settlers expansion, Infernal Contraption, Toledo and To Court the King. We played Infernal Contraption that night, roping TxB into the let's-figure-out-the-rules-for-a-new-game scenario. The MO and I both liked that one a lot.
Anyhow, the point is that we took a good look at our game stack, and realized that it's getting pretty sizable. Enough so that when we get hooked on a new game (hello Quickword), it's easy to forget about great games that we already own. So we decided to set up a play-every-game-we-own tourney. I made a list and came up with 63 titles! Ten through 69 is easy to randomize with a d6 and a d10 so the first 60 games on the list are numbered and we'll slot the remainders into the used numbers as we roll them. We agreed to play at least one game per week, so this experiment should go on for about, oh, ONE YEAR....
Official game night is Wednesday, but we snuck in an extra one tonight. Behold the first result of the Willard Grand Tourney:
Woohoo! You know the MO is not going to let this early lead go unanswered for long. Feel free to place your bets here ;-)
for a morning of laundry and vacuuming and mopping.
Peaches & cava. I sure do love peach season, and I have to admit that Texas makes very tasty peaches. (Coming from Georgia, it was natural to be skeptical....)
I've finally wrapped up a bit of a genealogy project--scanning and transcribing a set of letters that my great-aunt wrote back to her family from Europe while she was with the Red Cross after WWII. I really enjoyed reading them, and I was kind of surprised at just how "long ago" some of the scenes she described sounded to me. My favorite part of the project came near the end of the stack of letters, though. When she was transferred to Schweinfurt, she wrote:
Guess where I'm living at the moment. In an honest to goodness castle. This beautiful castle which is just like a museum with all the armored suits, swords, carvings, figurines, beautiful paintings, etc., belonged to a Nazi named Wm. Saks who is now on trial for having been a War Criminal. He owned a tremendous ball bearing factory.
I thought that all seemed pretty specific, so I spent a few minutes on google and wikipedia and quickly found out that she was in Mainberg Castle. (In her next letter she got the spelling of Sachs corrected--that helped verify things.)
I also found this site, whose author, Don Enderton, writes:
From August 29 to October 2, 1945 my father, a U. S. Army officer, resided in Mainberg castle, near Schweinfurt, Germany.
(Be sure to go look at the pictures.) The internet makes "small world" happenstances even more likely....
(More about Auntie Marge's letters here.)
