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Posts Tagged ‘Pennsylvania’

It has been so hot here that the prospect of Plein Air painting is somewhat repulsive. Perhaps a drawing done on the spot with color notes and lots of photo reference is the way to go.  Right now I’m setting up at the drawing board next to the computers. The Weather Alert radio upstairs just turned itself on automat­i­cally with some warning or advisory. It was in a cabinet in the dining room staying quiet. I’d just taken it back out again. I know now that we have another day of excessive heat expected here on Saturday. Oh joy.

I’m surrounding myself with these OTT Light bulbs. They give you brilliant illumi­nation but they are CFLs and will save a lot over a period of time and they are daylight balanced. You can find a nice display of OTT lighting at any JoAnn Fabric Store and I’ve even seen them at Michaels Arts and Crafts. They are also available here online and have a nice variety of shapes and forms that they come in to suit people’s different needs.

Color-wise they are much more effective than the old Luxo Lamps that I was used to working with. They relied on a round fluorescent tube and in the center was a spot for the incan­descent bulb. While this gave you more balanced lighting than fluorescent or incan­descent bulbs alone… it still did not come close to daylight. These OTT bulbs seem to make a big difference. You ought to check them out. These bulbs do reduce eyestrain quite a bit.  I’ve got to get on into painting here now.  so … I’ll keep writing  …more later

We started at Talbots and widened the search area to yesterday’s score at the King of Prussia Mall. Moving around the area near the Oxford Valley Mall and then in the Oxford Valley Mall itself we looked at just about all the dresses and such that are available. Sue just wasn’t going for what she saw.

The stuff that we found in the local stores was the result of a process of deciding what had the least wrong with it rather than what we liked about it. That’s just not the right way to go about shopping. Sue spent hours looking through the stores online to see whether or not they had something that she truly liked.

All of that changed once we were shopping at the King of Prussia Mall. Quality stores and pleasant sales people make all the difference in the world. The King of Prussia Mall reminded me very much of a Mall that I’d grown up near… The Mall at Short Hills in NJ. That was a nice Mall. The woman who helped Sue was great and it was an easy choice. Neiman Marcus got the sale.

I really don’t under­stand the big deal that people make when going shopping with their female companion. It’s not difficult and the opinion is generally helpful. I had a very good time overall and all those dresses and shoes… My mind was drifting a few times thinking about Sue in some of the stiletto heels that were in the stores. Heels are an “inter­esting” design. Absolutely imprac­tical. Right up there with neckties for men. I can’t imagine standing on an angle like that. Got to say though… Nothing could possibly terminate a beautiful leg more grace­fully than a good pair of heels. At home — Rudy kept his attention on home security while we were out. Growling and gnashing at a whole bunch of nothing.

That can mess up your whole day. My computer decided it was time to add the latest QuickTime, iTunes and ActiveX Kilibits update all at the same time.  Something had to give and it gave. Thankfully,  I use Norton Save & Restore on this machine and I used my Symantec Recovery Disk to get myself out of a mess. The utilities let me run CHKDSK /f and I was able to reroute the corrupted file around the bad blocks or sectors. It worked. I ran all kinds of tune ups tonight and seems to be nice and stable again. That’s a good think because I have a lot going on tomorrow. Typography, color breaking, web site work… and some stationery.

Working on some drawings based on my series of shots at Tanner’s in Ivyland, PA

Have to figure out how to upload some of my new NextGEN Galleries…

I found some software yesterday and downloaded it for a spin. Nothing too fancy but actually quite pleasant to use. That’s right. I just created this theme for WP myself. It was very inter­esting going through all of the various framework. To make a long story short — I’m a designer and Art Director — not a php kind of guy.

So — locating this was a good thing for me. It was adver­tised on AlexKing​.org in a little banner in the article about the people at Crowd Favorite updating all of the Carrington themes. That was really amazing to read that. I have plenty of graphics — both illus­tration and photog­raphy as well as Graphic Design. Now I can get this stuff to work together instead of trying to get every­thing to fit the hard way.

“Now I can get this stuff to work together instead of trying to get every­thing to fit the hard way. I shot the moon with my Olympus on a tripod with a telephoto lens and a variety of different timings.”

This is all working a lot smoother than I’d imagined that it would’ve. That’s good. I had a techni­cally oriented family member once tell me that I’d never be able to edit any PHP code. Well that’s fine with me. I’d much rather just work on my pictures. Speaking of pictures — The sky tonight at maybe 9:00 or 9:30 PM was lit up contin­ually by lightning.  No really close crashes but some nice bass sub-woofer action — Wow. Sue was working on a project for work and I was afraid that perhaps the lights might blink out during the storm but instead all kept going fine. I’ll keep working on my theme.

Thanks for reading -