Categories
Abducted by Aliens Educate Me

Brain Update…

View from the Metro

This is the view as we pulled into the Metro station to go to the Eiffel Tower. So the next photos from the honeymoon set will be a select few of the hundreds I have of the Eiffel Tower; consider yourself warned.

I’m happy to report that the change in medicine seems to have helped out a great deal – I had my first test since the change, in Chemistry on Monday, and I got …. *drumroll* … an A! Whoo hoo!

I got a D on the first test. D! I still can’t believe it. I didn’t get anything lower than a really high B last semester. Fortunately, my Chemistry teacher drops our lowest test grade. So that D won’t hurt me and there is still hope for an A in the class.

Now I’m going to return to studying Biology. Our second lab practical over Kingdom Plantae is tomorrow, followed by the unit test on Tuesday. Plants are much easier to deal with then all that itty bitty bacteria and algae stuff. Hopefully I can continue to make the grades I am used to – even if I get a B overall in this class I will be thrilled. Kingdom Protista sucks.

Knitting photos tomorrow. I have lots to share!

Categories
Birthday Wishes

Debu_Update

A few weeks ago, I talked about Deb and the need for blood donors. Today is Deb’s New Birthday – the day of her bone marrow stem cell transplant. I snagged the update below from Manolo’s Shoe Blog – Sis #1 wrote it and sent it to Manolo, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me sharing it here.

Dear Manolo,

Just wanted to let you know an update on my sister at www.debutaunt.com . She is going to be getting her blood stem cell transplant on Monday. Right now, the Debu is already admitted to the hospital to get the preparatory treatment—radiation and chemo. The blood stem cell transplant is not an easy process to go through but it gives the best hope to thousands of people, including my sister.

Though going through a transplant is not terribly fun, we learned something that we didn’t know previously—that the donation process is pretty easy. People think of donating blood stem cells as being very painful, and the old way of doing it was certainly not comfortable. But the new technology does not involve an operation into the bone marrow, rather, they just take extra stem cells out of the donors’ blood—kind of like giving platelets.

My sister was fortunate that she had a match in my brother. But there are thousands of people who are not that lucky and rely on the National Marrow Donor Program to find a match. Here is information on how to join it: http://www.marrow.org/HELP/join_the_registry.html .

Anyhow, with the transplant, the Debu is going to be in the hospital for 20-40 more days and is already bored as heck. As her hospital fashion statement, she rejects hospital gowns as being too immodest and ugly, and favors Nick and Nora pajamas (Target now carries them—they are the most genius company). She has the internets in her hospital room, and it has been a lifesaver to be able to visit her internet friends. So if you would like to visit, I am sure she would adore it.

Buona giornata!
Steph

Go send the Debu some love and cheer her on in her fight. She is totally going to kick cancer’s ass.

Categories
Geek Love Picture Time

How to Create Spot-Color Photographs!

Color Cutout Tutorial

I wrote this on Tuesday, but before I could publish it the laptop died. I forgot to post it when I got home that night – oops! It has been a crazy week.

I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, and since I am at my Photo I class without anything to develop (stupid winter weather and gray days outside), I decided it was a good time to write up my tutorial on how I created the colorized images I’ve posted recently, but if you want to do these cutouts, then check out these Photo Cutouts services.

Step 1 – Open up the image you want to color in Photoshop. (I use Photoshop CS2. I’m sure you can do this in other software, but I don’t know how. So these are the steps I do in Photoshop CS2.)

Step 2 – Convert the image to B&W using your preferred method. I use the Channel Mixer. Be sure to click the “Monochrome” checkbox, and set the Red, Green and Blue channels. I set this one to Red 60, Blue 20, and Green 32. Some people say you should make sure the numbers add up to 100. Others recommend settings similar to what I use. In the end, it is all about what looks best to you.

Step 3 – Set the color for the paintbrush to black for the foreground and white for the background. “Paint” over anything you want in color with black and – bam! – the color will appear! If you accidentally paint over something you don’t want in color, switch your paintbrush to white and paint over it again and it will go back to black & white again.

That’s it! I change the paintbrush settings to larger settings to make it faster to color, and I change it to very fine pinpoint to get into small places. Save it when you’re done (don’t save over the original if you want to keep it in color!) and enjoy!

Categories
Amuse Me Media Consumption

Loving the Project Runway…

I love Project Runway. I adore Project Runway. And this weekend, I have finally caught up on watching Project Runway. Yay! So now I could finally read all the fabulous recaps on fourfour and Blogging Project Runway. Oh my goodness, I’m in pain now from all the laughter.

Fourfour has many other great recaps – including my other favorite, America’s Next Top Model. I highly recommend it. Check it out, before I go all Shetangey on you!

Categories
Geek Love Knittastic!

I’m Going to Poke You in the Eye!

I Never Promised You a Rose GardenOk, ok, I’m not really going to poke you in the eye. I just sing that song to myself every time I think of the Pointy Sticks podcast. I really need to find out from Jay Lee if I can use a snippet of that Flying Fish Sailor’s song in the podcast – it would be the perfect intro music!

Episode 2 is finally live. At last! Whew. I had everything selected and downloaded yesterday so I could make the podcast after I returned from my Guild meeting, and then the sound card for the computer wouldn’t work! Gah! So I had to test out all the other computers to see if any of them would record in stereo (they won’t) and the set up the laptop to do the recording. It all worked out in the end … until I found out this morning that we had no internet access.

Talk about frustrating!

So now that the internet is finally working after the cable company came out to do repairs somewhere nearby, I was able to upload the podcast and the show notes. Whew. Now I’m going back to working on my Lady Eleanor and later taking photos of my knitting.