ionosphere

I sure hope that you have some good fun on your Birthday — Wednesday December 14, 2011. I’m looking forward to it also. Time to draw. And paint. And write about things. Been reading some books by Betty Edwards and the two hemispheres of the brain offer up some inter­esting reading. I will be discussing my obser­va­tions in the next couple of weeks.

2011-12-13     22:34:28

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We just don’t have a match with the Canada Geese. Parts and size do look similar…

and the Hybrid flew in with the other Geese soon after we arrived in Yardley to try and get some more shots of the relatively rare bird. Canadas have black feet. Canadas have a white chest… Canada Geese have that graphic facial and neck band that lets you know that it is none other than a Canada Goose. This bird does not. Even had orange colored legs. This bird had a chest that matched its feathers, and unusual head markings.

My Wife, Sue, was first to spot this goose and shot many of our images both still and video. I was concen­trating on the Historic Library Building and the way the sun was going down around it. I came up to see the goose and get a couple of shots. We did okay but decided to come back on the weekend to see if the Honker was still there. If we had been earlier the goose would not have been there as the gaggle all came in and landed right in front of us. Good timing.

Seems that whatever kind of migratory bird that you are inter­ested in… All are on the move right now. Red Tailed Hawks as well as Falcons are being seen daily and they are making our Crows act up. I guess that we just have to accept the fact that it actually will be quite cold soon.

Any feedback on the species or lack thereof is welcomed and enjoyed. There  is a mail link and the comment area will inform all as to what we are seeing. I do get a lot of spam so hopefully all will go through without being grabbed by the robots on the server. Hope that you had a great Thanksgiving and are headed into smooth holidays with lots of thoughtful people around you. Best wishes to all.

Bill       2011-11-28    17:10:07

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I just noticed that my weather feed on the blog had gone away. I had partnered with Weather​.com and was a regis­tered user, etc. So for whatever reason — Weather​.com has ceased this practice and I went hunting for other sources of data. Located and placed that last night and I actually like Yahoo’s infor­mation stream a little better than what I’d been using. How about that? Good.

I also had lost my really excellent mp3 player called “WPaudio” by Todd Iceton. I went into the WordPress Plugin forums and a young lady “Ursula (WP Gal)” had resolved the problem with a very minor change to the javascript in one of the files. All that I had to do was pull out a period before mp3 and the entire plugin came back to life. I’d forgotten just how good that audio was sounding in WordPress. Excellent. It’s back and doing just fine. Yes indeed.

Bill   2011-11-14  13:31:12

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Sue seemed pretty pleased with her Ear Wrap. Looked good. Here is one of the sketches from that process. I like the buildings that the Craftsmen inhabit there in Tyler and I’ve made some assem­blies that I’m drawing. I think that I prefer the somewhat unique archi­tecture of the barns there. More to follow. - Bill  2011-11-11  05:54:40.

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Sue and I enjoyed a walk through the Craft Fair at  Tyler Park on the weekend of the Twenty Third. One of the intriguing things that we enjoyed was a set of small pens with miniature piglets up for adoption. They were really cute and ate tiny pellets of chow. I love watching Sue enjoy those animals. We also stopped at a couple of the handmade jewelry booths and located some items of interest. That was a good thing. I like those Art and Craft shows. I guess last year about this time we were in a couple of the Craft Shows. I think so…

While there, I grabbed a bunch of images to draw from later — and unfor­tu­nately I got sick right afterward. I started a couple of drawings of what I saw and will show them here when I finish. Leg is still hurting pretty much today and I just got back from another blood test. These physical jolts of late are getting to me. Seemed like that show was a long time ago. Not so much really. Before I had too much more time go by…  I wanted to show a couple piggies.  2011-11-10,  15:09:53

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Spent some time last night going through the forums on the Artisteer website and I’m liking what I’m seeing. For those who don’t know — Artisteer 3 is a new web building software that makes it easy to create and modify your own blog/CMS/webpage format and post it to the web. Ionosphere has become an Artisteer affiliate and will be showing you how to get to their website to try on this software yourself. A myriad of elements that go into page building arrive on your screen and navigation between those elements is easy, familiar and even friendly. I will be showing some of what you can do with these elements and how they can help you. This entire blog was done in Artisteer with some help from Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Corel Painter. It was a nice change to start making what I’d wanted rather than having to look for someone else’s gener­ously shared theme. I had done that for a while. Artisteer lets you easily do your own design and bring your own images into what you are doing, etc. It is just a better fit. Much more on this topic to follow.

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All kinds of a tough time last week. I’d heard that Remicade may provide “flu-like” symptoms… From the patient stand­point, just how far do you let it go? I’m still here so I suppose that means that I haven’t gone too far — yet I think another two days would have been pushing my luck. I guess that I have gone far enough that I wonder about some things that regular people in their everyday just don’t have on their minds. I missed the early Nor’easter Snowstorm that we had. I “came to”.… seeing a pile in the gutter here or there. I remember it really snowing sideways at one point.

My latest infusion was a week ago last Wednesday. By Wednesday night I was sinking. Peak temper­ature got to around 104 degrees and I was delirious. Usually you cough and have an idea that something bad is coming. I just had some serious side and back pain and then I was up in a repeti­tious sequence — shivering with the fever till I’d lay down long enough to overheat and sweat… It was a miniature Hell. All of it framed by deep black muffled sleep…

The past week contained paranormal occur­rences. I saw my Dad in my hospital room as a Minister spoke to me. I swear the eyes coming through those glasses were no longer the Minister’s but those of my own father. I was warmed by the event and I’ve been reflecting on religious things and activ­ities since. All very serious business.

One day, totally out of the blue, two very kind women came forward and had bought me balloons at the Hospital Gift Shop. This was because they had the same last name as me. That surprised me very much as I don’t run into people named Beauchamp… ever. I had been running a very high fever and had been aware only remotely of their presence. Out there lost in the fog with people moving around and talking like a bunch of radios in the distance. I’m glad that their loved one seemed to do well and went home that very same day.

Been working on my leg wound the “PG” Pyoderma Gangrenosum on the right. It is hurting really quite bad even tonight. I was intrigued to find out that there are medical profes­sionals that actually can enjoy another’s suffering. I’d had a little experience in that area almost ten years ago and now it’s out of my life. There is no room for that to come back in any way shape or form. Evil walks on two legs in Langhorne.

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I arrived on time at St. Mary’s Cancer Center — where they do the precise infusion of chemotherapy drugs on a regular basis.  To help avoid allergic reactions to the medicine, I’d taken 50 mgs of Benadryl which made my focus softer and just sort of took the edge off. It was easy to doze and I stayed in a semi dream-state thinking of paintings and drawings I’d like to do. I had my Watercolor Solutions Book by Charles Reid with me and I read between naps. Those thoughts were good and let my mind drift away from the bank of 6 or 8 special Lazy-Boy reclining chairs with a shelf on the left side for the pillow under your arm which is equipped with an intra­venous port. My medicine is not chemo as I don’t have cancer and hope that I won’t. The medicine is called a “Biological” and is very potent. It has to be admin­is­tered just right — so these are the correct people to do that. They got me all set up and soon my IV Bag of Remicade arrived so that my system can work on a reversal of the Pyoderma Gangrenosum that is hurting so bad as it destroys tissue on my right leg. Truly different in its nature everyday,  it is a sore reality with sharp pain on a daily basis. Nerve pain feels very much like being burned or an electric shock. Supposed to get better after a second dose of Remicade… If this doesn’t work — Humira is also a consid­er­ation. Yep, this is a whole new ball game. Speaking of which… My Phillies had some bad luck last night. So very close…

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I’m almost finished getting my computer back to where it was at last backup. Verifying my data against the image file again on D:\ Drive. Seemed that it was okay with the program to give me two identical C:\ Drives. Really my own fault. I don’t have to mess with things like this too often.

So — now I’ve put the jumper on the hard drive’s slave status indicator again and it is telling me that the current verifi­cation procedure will be finished in a measly 18 hours… That is a lot of data. Thousands of images and video — all my rough digitized movies that I had set aside to edit. All of my MP3 music files and the like. The Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXpress, the works. Premiere and AfterEffects. Glad that I’m not having to reinstall all of this software and re-register and re-activate. The companies that you get this stuff from all make the consumer feel like some sort of criminal and you must prove this and prove that. Planning ahead with this really helped. Got to mention Seagate -

I am extremely impressed with the Seagate GoFlex external hard drive series. Saw this coming and I have Sue’s machine as well as mine safely backed up. They advertise the new “FreeAgent” which also runs backups wirelessly… that’s nice — USB 3.0 also”

This week has some has some challenges that have to be faced. Lots of good things to pay attention to as well… and of course that damn 90 degree plus heat. Haven’t been quite myself this weekend. Got a Prednisone bloat going on that makes it hard to recognize that guy in the mirror. This is infusion week so we’ll see what happens… Hope that your week is a good one.

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Apparently, many people were not even aware that my big brother
Theodore Merle Beauchamp, III had left us all. Panasonic — I apologize –

I was surprised to hear from my brother Ted’s former coworkers that appar­ently were left unaware that Ted had died 27^th May of 2007. He was a good man and funny guy. It was hard to keep up with his puns and jokes. I think that we may be hearing from a couple of those people here in the blog. I am pulling the slideshow out that I placed on the anniversary of his departure and placing it again below.  I wish that I had a greater variety of images but I really don’t. After a divorce and my family stuff disap­pearing… plus several moves on the way out of New Jersey — they just don’t exist. I may find some video and digitize it.

Not exactly sure what’s left there. I took Ted on a flight with Jim Mount on the Asendin Balloon where we climbed out to a mile after doing the Hare and Hound event at the New Jersey Festival of Ballooning one year. I shot the whole thing on VHS and I believe Jim Mount added it to his collection. That was after I paid full price for us  to fly and had tried to get Jim a big Cameron Balloon Job with Panasonic with a large floating Camcorder… Life’s funny that way.

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