Taylor Tattle

6th March: 30 Days of Lists

Steady on!  Three posts in one day, what is going on?!!  Just conscious of the fact that I do tend to ramble on, so I backtracked with smaller posts.

Still pondering a way forward with the old blog, but there's little room in my brain for anything other than learning Aperture and re-learning Photoshop Elements {I couldn't bear not to have photoshop, and was able to download an affordable version from Apple that didn't have the organiser}. I'm pretty happy with PSE for now, it seems to have moved on since 6, (which I think was the last version I purchased for the pc) and some features I loved that aren't even in CS5.  I was also delirious to discover that Rad Lab works in Elements too!

Anyway, I digress as usual ...

March 6th: Things to Collect

*  hugs; you can never have too many

*  scrapbooking supplies; I was once referred to as a collector, LOL!

*  mugs (mostly from coffee shops); trying to curb this addiction!

Here's a very small selection:

*  computer equipment; although its not me that hangs onto broken stuff

*  cameras

Discovered this one tucked away in the store room ...

Holly was looking at it yesterday and wondering where the screen was; its an old film camera!  How things have changed.

Have a fabby day!  Its Sports Day at school today, neither of them were full of enthusiasm; it would have been a completely different story if Holly was participating in the "Running to get a One Direction concert ticket" and Alex was participating in the "how many {whatever} you can shoot in a minute" contest. Sport really isn't our thing!

4th March: 30 Days of Lists

Haven't yet written anything for 2nd or 3rd March, since I need to ponder more (and to be honest I have been glued to my mac and various new programs that I have installed!). My brain is having to work very hard to keep up, but I'm a fast learner when it comes to software, so its all good!

March 4th: Things I will put off until tomorrow

* clearing the scrappy room

*  setting up old desk as a Project Life station

*  housework of any description; no comment

*  testing out the EHD's on the mac; for some reason I worry that they will self destruct or wipe clean, but its the only way to get all my photos into Aperture

*  exercise; nothing new there then

March 5th: Words to live by

I need to ponder this a little more, but so far I have ...

*  Be yourself; everyone else is taken

I spend way too much time and energy trying to be who I perceive others think I should, or doing what I think I ought.  I truly do not want to live like this any more.

Have a fabby day!  Its really windy here with yet more sandstorms at the weekend. Now I'm not wishing for the blazing hot summer to arrive yet, but less sand blowing onto my wooden floors would be rather nice ...  who needs to go to the beach, LOL!

March1st: 30 Days of Lists

Due to being, er, just a little bit obsessed with my new toy, I have been somewhat out of the loop, sort of everything wise!  During one of my forays into collecting web site addresses to link on my desktop, I discovered that 30 days of lists was running again.  I signed up in a nano second, and ensured I was on their mailing list to be prepared for the next time!

There's something about little daily challenges that inspire me; I love finding a new cute notebook to write in ....

and pondering the possibilities of what I could do with that information.  So without further ado, let's get started.

{disclaimer: I may not post every day (you don't say, LOL!), but hope to get as many of my entries recorded here as possible, because notebooks do get lost!}

March 1st: Challenges to accept

*  30 Days of Lists

*  Project Life

*  12 photos on the 12th

*  Inner Excavation

*  Morning Pages

*  iphone Project 365 (note this didn't have to be +1 since I started after Feb 29th!). 

Way too much for anyone to keep up with in one month, but worth a try I feel! Any of these on your list this month?

28 February: And all because the lady loves ...

Maccie ......

 

{photo effects via Camera+; knowledge gleaned from fabby ishot that class at Renee Pearson }

Yes, after many years of pining (well more than I care to remember actually!) I finally have a mac.  And its not the plastic one that dear hubby always quipped I would be getting, ha ha ha.  

Its been a truly frustrating couple of weeks; my pc is grinding to a halt (its less then 2 years old too) and I am constantly being hacked. And yes, I have expensive Norton Security installed and don't download things willy nilly, so it makes me pretty cranky to say the least.  I've even had to go so far as to instigate 2 step verification with Google since that account was hacked into last week.  

To cut a long story short .... mmm ... its hard to put into words how I feel about the new addition to the scrappy room!  Have to admit I was in shock the first evening, I had no clue how to use it (didn't help that the batteries were flat on both the keyboard and mouse, so that I thought it wasn't working??!!); since there's no manual once its all set up.  Oh and none of my peripherals worked, so I was a tad upset to say the least.  But come the following morning, and I had the time (and quiet) to get to grips with it all, I was totally in love.

Once I had searched out all the installation disks, I discovered that the Sony 4 x 6 printer was PC only (shame, since I use this for everything!), the HP printer is recognised, but won't print out any black (?!), the scanner worked fine, as did the Bamboo tablet.  Not as bad as first thought.

I don't have Photoshop, because the Mac version costs almost as much as the imac itself; sad, but true.  And I can only get a student discount in Dubai when the kids are in University (and I certainly don't want to wait that long).  I'm not really worried, I will wait, it was worth it just to get the mac.  I'm missing ACDSee's organisational abilities, and hope to find Aperture is a worthy replacement (will download the trial version soon). Other than that, I will just have to set up my pc once a week and print out photos for Project Life etc. Will also have to figure out how to transfer files from the pc, but maybe I need to have the hard drive checked for hidden viruses first .... 

Having a new machine has certainly given me a sense of relief that I can have a fresh start; its amazing what you download without even thinking about it; files that can be read on-line, digi freebies etc, it all mounts up and to be honest, I never get to organise it, so it just feels like clutter. I don't do well with clutter (which you just wouldn't believe if you saw that state of my scrappy room, once more *sigh*).  Which I blame entirely on the fabby Japanese shop that has recently opened where almost everything is 7 dhs only (about a pound) and now has me purchasing rather large amounts of storage containers each week to sort my stash.  They are cute and colourful too, and have resulted in piles of varying degrees of stash sorting-ness all over the floor!

OK, well that's the short (?!!) version of where I have been recently and why I haven't been blogging.  Hoping to resume regular service soon ....... (how long have I been saying that for?!).  Also hope to check out everyones blogs too once I migrate all the urls from Google Reader.

16 February: I {heart} textures

Oh dear, looks like I have found another obsession, LOL! 

Actually I was going to post about our lovely Valentine's day meal at Rococo's, however, I made the mistake of trying to take photos with my iphone and the flash off.  Lets just say there's more grain on them than in the desert. Even my adored RadLab gave up trying to fix them.  Oh well, lesson learnt. 

No matter, I can happily report that we loved the restaurant (although the decor was rather too modern for our taste), our waiter was a sweetie and explained each course in full detail and the food was exquisite!   We even had heart shaped ravioli (filled with prawns and baby squid), yum yum.  Naturally the Italian bubbly went down well, and I was quite restrained in only having two glasses!

Anyhow, back to textures .... I'm really enjoying the look of textured photos, subtle, yet always interesting.  Taking advantage of a 40% discount, I treated myself to Kim Klassen's Studio Collection.  Instant love!  Well, until I tried to play.  Mmmm .... I got myself into a bit of a tizzy to be honest; RadLab is so much easier {wink}. In the end I closed down the computer and made myself some herbal tea!

The photo wasn't saying anything to me either (no I haven't gone crazy, I don't actually talk to photos, LOL!), and I wasn't too keen on the cropping.  Perfectionist much?  It needed a quote, so I searched for a quote on coffee.  Oh my, there were some really funny ones; this was my favourite:

Error running WAKEUP:BAT; COFFEE.INI not found

And my finished photo ...

{hands up who is now singing "You're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you ..."}  Oh how a few words from a song can take you back!

Now please do not ask me what I did to get to this point, all that I know is that I am happy with it today.  (I did use 3 of Kim's textures and a text overlay, plus I ran RadLab's Tap Shoes filter on it at the end).  It seems there is much to learn, which is why I have now signed up for Kim's photoshop Test Kitchen, which appears to be chock full of tutorials on how to use textures etc. 

OK, must dash, our weekend is due to start soon (our schools close on Thursday afternoon), so I had better get my last peaceful coffee in, LOL!  Have a great weekend!