John's working on the planter.

Audrey's studying on a pile of seed sacks.

And the Red Sox are filling the shop with extra inning baseball.

These are the good old days.

These Are the Good Old Days

Hybrid Cat

I took this photo a while back. I like it, pretty much, except that all the iron parked under the porch railing bothers me.

It might have taken less time to actually move the iron than it did to edit it out of the photo. But would the cat keep her seat on the railing while I dug for keys and rearranged the parking lot? Maybe not. So I cleaned up the yard with Photoshop Elements instead.

Isn't that better? But then, because it's fun and because Photoshop Elements is somewhat addicting, I decided I wanted to turn my photo into a painting. So I applied the "Paint Daubs" filter. Here is the result:

Oops! That might be just a little too artsy for me. I like the background, but the cat just about got daubed away into meaningless, especially around the tail. So I had to back up a step and remove the daubs. Click click click, and I was back to the original, minus the used car lot. Don't you wish it were that easy when you drip latex on the rug?

And now the beauty of Photoshop shines. The next step is to copy just the cat and porch into a separate layer. I can keep this foreground material in its original condition, or maybe just daub it a wee bit, while using the full Paint Daub on the background layer behind it.

After I've daubed the background, I lay the unedited foreground cat and railing on top of the blurred background.

Compare the original to the final product, which is something of a painting/photograph hybrid.

Isn't Photoshop fun?

Quack Fatner

One time a friend of a friend in Denver asked the girls about growing up on a farm. "Are there nail salons out in the country?" she asked. "Does your little town have a Bath & Body Works?"

Our little town has four hundred residents, one convenience store, and no stop lights. Nope, no Bath & Body Works.

The next nearest town doesn't have a Bath & Body Works either, nor the next, nor the one after that.

But I like the small towns around me. Towns where the feed store sells

and

and

Towns where, when you drive by a snowman, you probably know who made it.

Nice work, Lydia and Laurel :)


So yeah, it's pretty hard to get by without a nail salon in the next block.

But at least, if I need some I know where to get it!

Spiderman

A few days ago, the girls persuaded me to watch Spiderman, the movie.

Then the real Spiderman showed up across the road.

This guy may have destroyed the Green Goblin, but he's imaginary.

I like this superhero better. He's real, and he turned the power back on!

The Trend is My Friend

My yard on Monday.

My yard on Wednesday.

Homegrown

Steal a couple of eggs from under Broody,

and a couple of last summer's onions from the bin.

Pluck a handful of spinach out of a snowbank

and voila'........
Homegrown quiche!

Platitudes

"April showers bring May flowers."

"March comes in like a lion, but goes out like a lamb."

Whoever wrote that probably didn't live in Nebraska.

Two power generators.

Acute Angle

What is this?

It may look like a mess to you, but that's not what I see.

I see a victory.

It is the skeleton of a hot frame I constructed last fall, built to test my friend Gordon's claim that spinach could live through Nebraska's cold winter and be ready for the table before most folks have even planted a spring seed.

Gordon was right. Garden fresh ready-to-eat spinach on April first. Who woulda' thunk it?

Sunshine Rooster

Someone gave me this blown glass rooster.

March apparently didn't get the "go out like a lamb" memo from on high. This rooster is covering for the outdoor grey by splashing spring colors around my living room. I like his attitude.