First Daffodils of the Season!

We have a rainy day but that doesn’t dampen my spirits when it comes to our daffodils! I have been patiently waiting all week for the earliest variety to open up. So nothing was going to stop me from getting a little bit soggy and taking a quick snapshot to celebrate the first blooms of the season.

Spring is arriving!

Photoshop Tutorial - B&W with Color Spots

Many of my blog visitors participate in or follow the routine Brenda Photo Challenge. Cindra of Knits & Pics & Favorite Things is the hostess for the next challenge and she picked a great theme. The challenge is to take an existing photo and change it through photo editing software. I promised Cindra to help out by posting a tutorial or two for everybody. I recently taught myself a new Photoshop Elements trick and decided to share it.

So what does a Photoshop trick have to do with this yummy looking focaccia bread that my sweet hubby recently made? Mmmm, look at those roasted Italian tomatoes, onions, and fresh herbs. And YES, it smelled and tasted GREAT!
Okay, okay. I hear you! Enough with the gastronomical distraction, let’s get on with the tutorial! The subject of my tutorial is the picture I took of the bread before it got baked. The lesson shows you how to take a picture that looks like this…

… and change it to a picture that looks like this!

I opened up a Photobucket account, uploaded screenshot pictures there, and inserted step-by-step instructions. If you want to learn this technique, please click on the link below.

Photoshop Tutorial - Black and White with Color Spots

I hope that you enjoy this little lesson and will try it soon on one of your pictures. In the meantime, we are snacking on that delicious bread!

Kentucky Trip - My Old Kentucky Home

This is the next installment of our Kentucky trip last November!

When we stayed a couple of days in Bardstown, we made sure that we visited My Old Kentucky Home State Park, nestled in the middle of the city. This park celebrates the inspiration of Stephen Foster’s music composition which is now Kentucky’s state song.

While traveling from his home town of Pittsburgh to New Orleans, Foster stopped in Bardstown to visit his cousins, the Rowan family, and stayed at their beautiful mansion, called Federal Hill. According to folklore, Mr. Foster composed the song at this home.

We had a lovely tour and wished we could have taken pictures of the fabulous antiques inside. And here is a little trivia for you! I didn’t learn this until I was preparing this post. The home is featured on the “tail” side of the Kentucky quarter.

Stay tuned for a couple more featured stories from our trip!

Photo Challenge: Signs of Spring

Time for the Brenda Photo Challenge! The subject is Signs of Spring, picked by the current challenge hostess, Joy of Shuttershy. Thank you, Joy, for selecting this great theme. I also appreciate my visitors for stopping by and checking out my entries!

Natural Signs of Spring
The spring season is starting to awaken here in east Tennessee. The forsythia bushes are blooming, and the faintest of light green colors is starting to tip out on the weeping willows. Yeah! With the help of a recent warm spell this month, our daffodils are stretching toward the sky and getting ready to begin their 2009 show.

Artistic Signs of Spring

With my temporary consulting work winding down, I got industrious earlier this week and made up some new greeting cards for my inventory. I used an altered version of a daffodil photograph that I took in the gardens last year.

Hopping Signs of Spring
Marty is getting into the spirit of the upcoming season here at the homestead. While he guards the door to my home office, he looks quite dapper wearing a beautiful green ribbon.

Taxing My Patience and Sanity

Guess what I have been doing lately? Preparing our income tax return! What fun!

I am very diligent in keeping my blog entertaining and upbeat. My goal is to make it a soothing respite from the frustrations of the world. So please indulge me during my annual exercise in futility. I am a wee bit frustrated and need to vent.

For the last several years, I have used the online version of Tax Act for preparing our Federal taxes. It has one quality that I find most endearing. It is free. However, there is usually something in the tax code that trips me up every year. This year was no exception. I wasted several hours coaxing the program to give me all of the prompts so that I could correctly complete the required forms for an IRA conversion. I could have gotten mad at the program. But that would be ignoring the true source of my frustration: the Federal government and its insane system of taxation.

As food for thought, chew on these statistics:
- Words in the tax code: 3.7 million
- Pages of tax laws and regulations: 67,506
- Pages in the 1040 instruction book: 161
- Number of changes to the tax code in 2008: 500
- Percent of taxpayers using paid preparers: 59
- Percent of taxpayers using tax software: 16
- Percent of IRS answers to phone queries that are correct: 90
- Number of official “tax expenditures” or loopholes in the code: 161

(courtesy of The Washington Post, 2-8-09)

And it is going to get even worse next year because the newly anointed “stimulus” (aka “spending”) bill reportedly contains 344 pages of tax changes. Oh joy.

The good news is that I completed my ordeal and our Federal income tax forms are now filed! I should return to my normal good nature shortly.

Marty assisted me by taking pictures of the whole process and creating a pictorial essay to share with you. He is such a clever fellow that he even used the ink color that is currently in fashion.

This was Donna’s composure while she compiled the paperwork and put the data into the online software.

Besides the computer software, here is another essential tool that she used.

After Donna completed the electronic forms, she went out to the garden shed and got out one of these.

And filled it up with a pile of these. To the brim.

Then she sent it all here.

And our esteemed politicians lovingly placed it all here.

WHOOSH!

The end.

Homemade Bread

My sweet hubby is a wonderful cook, and he's always on the lookout for new and tasty recipes. A month or so ago, he bought a fresh batch of cookbooks, and one of them was Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Oh my, the man has been on a mission ever since!

He had to initially purchase a few essential items from King Arthur Four and our local Williams-Sonoma store for his baking quest (e.g., pizza stone, bakers peel, oven thermometer, dough rising bucket). Now he is routinely baking us yummy bread! With the high cost of artisan breads these days at the grocery store, we will quickly recoup our investment in a few baking tools. Best of all, the taste is FRESH!

This is rosemary/thyme flavored dough ready to be baked. The dough was first shaped and put on the bakers peel with a scattering of blue cornmeal. After rising, it was then scored and dusted with flour before being transferred to the hot pizza stone in the oven.

And here is the final result! Mmmmmm…

Would you like us to put out another place setting at the dinner table for you?

Happy Valentine's Day!

Love doesn’t make the world go round,

Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

(Elizabeth Browning)

Kentucky Trip - Kentucky Artisan Center

How about if I resume telling a few stories of our Kentucky journey during Thanksgiving week? It seems that I had gotten sidetracked more than once during the past couple of months. Before I get sidetracked again, perhaps I can sneak in a few posts to share additional highlights of our trip!

The Berea area holds a special place in our hearts because it is where my mother-in-law’s family originated. Hubby can share many tales about his grandmother’s old farmhouse on Peach Bloom Hill and the days that his mother was in charge of the hand weaving department of Berea College. This region is renowned for its handcrafts and fine arts. A visit here is a treat for your artistic senses, and now it is even better with the Kentucky Artisan Center.

The Center is conveniently located right off of Interstate 75. It opened in 2003 and is run by a Kentucky state authority. The Center is one of our favorite places to stop when we are in the area. On this trip, we bought several fine handcrafts for Christmas gifts, along with a few treasures for ourselves too! There are craft demonstrations on Saturdays, and we were delighted to watch a talented artist making old-fashioned goose feather trees. To make visitors comfortable amid all of the beautiful wares for sale, there is a café and squeaky clean rest rooms.

If you ever find yourself in Berea area, you would not be disappointed to stop a while and enjoy this beautiful Center. I daresay you would not walk out empty handed either!

Photo Challenge: Textures & Patterns

Today is the new Brenda Photo Challenge, and I am excited to be the hostess this time! The theme is Textures & Patterns. With the weather being so cold, I did not take any new photos for this challenge. But I had plenty of choices to select from my inventory of traveling pictures. I am always on the lookout for interesting scenes that feature great textures and patterns because they help me stretch for better artistic compositions. I chose the photographs below because each one of them makes me want to reach out and touch the subject matter.

This old grist wheel is built right into the stonework of an exterior wall of the Inn at Evins Mill (where we stayed last October). The photo was taken at f/3.5 and 1/60 second.

I love interesting trees and can’t resist taking pictures of them wherever I go. The stately pine in this photo was at Bryce Canyon National Park. Its weathered bark, shining in the morning light, tells a story about its difficult life. The camera settings were f/7.1 and 1/800 second.

While we were traveling on our Kentucky trip in November, we stopped at the Buffalo Trace distillery. This weathered door and stone foundation belong to an old warehouse used for storing the filled whiskey barrels. The warehouse roof and some upper walls were damaged by a tornado in 2006. Thankfully, no one was injured and not a single whiskey barrel was harmed! Repairs were made with the original old bricks. Unless you know where to look, it is hard to see where it was repaired. The photo was taken at f/5.6 and 1/160 second.

We didn’t take a tour at the famous Jack Daniels distillery last year (too crowded), but we stopped at the little town of Lynchburg to have a look around. In the town square was a charming bronze statue of Mr. Jack, settled in a reflective pose. I zoomed in for a close-up of that deeply lined face and weathered hands. The camera settings were f/5.6 and 1/30 second.

This was such an interesting picture, I decided to play with Photoshop and see what mischief I could create. I was pleased with this result, using a light blue/grey color wash and a graphic pen filter. Presto, it turned from a photograph to a sketch!

Photo Challenge Reminder

Don’t forget that the Brenda Photo Challenge is this Saturday, February 7. The theme is Textures & Patterns. It will be great fun to see the variety and interpretations of this subject matter!

If you haven't done so already , it’s not too late to sign up!

And Then There Was a Blizzard...

See what little present came to east Tennessee today?

I hopped in my little red truck this morning to go down to Chattanooga for a couple of business meetings. About 30 miles out of town, the rain turned into snow. Lots and LOTS of snow! The wipers got embedded with frozen slush and the windshield looked like it had been smeared with Vaseline. After having a bad accident in my younger days in weather like this, I turned my truck around and headed back home. I got home safely and stayed the rest of the day tucked inside. I may be a chicken, but I am a LIVE chicken!

February - A Look Ahead

Raise your hands if you are ready for spring! Whoa, we better get through this next month quickly because I see a LOT of hands. There has been wicked weather for a lot of folks, and I hope that all my visitors are getting through it with a minimum of scars and exasperated sighs.

Ah, what a difference a month makes. If you had told me a month ago what my life would be like now, I would have said that you were CRAZY! When the calendar rolled around to January, I was musing here on my blog about how wonderful it was to be retired, free of the “stress and time commitment of the work grind.” So what in the heck did I do? I flung myself right back into the fray!

I have had to recalibrate my tolerance and patience level for workplace bureaucracy, particularly the computer systems. And, my robe and I don’t spend nearly as much time together. But it is a lot easier to work when you don’t have the pressure of having to work for an income. It has been a good challenge to clean the dust out of my wee noggin, and it is also a worthwhile diversion during the winter months. I can see that the pace is going to pick up shortly, but I am confident that I can muster through it.

On the health front, my hubby has gotten some needed relief from his leg pain as a result of the cortisone shot in his hip. Hooray! He probably won’t need another one until the end of the year. It has been 8 weeks now since I got the cortisone shot in my knee, and the relief of the medicine is beginning to wear off. The doctor told me during a recent check up that I can get shots every 3 months. How well the pain stays away between shots will be the primary indicator on how long I can postpone knee-replacement surgery. My fingers are still crossed that I can keep going for a while! Oh yes, I also need to stay upright and not take any sudden trips to ground level! That is marked on my “to do” list in permanent ink.

The homestead is still for sale. No big surprise there since January is a fairly slow month for house sales. We expect February to be a big yawner too. One couple with children saw it a couple of weeks ago and they were very interested. However, they have a house that they need to sell before they could buy ours. We’ve heard that story before.

My handcrafting pastimes have taken a temporary holiday. The sewing machine is getting cleaned right now at the local quilting store. I also haven’t been doing much photography lately either. The camera will be getting some exercise as soon as the daffodil bulbs start blooming later on this month. I am the hostess of the Brenda Photo Challenge this coming Saturday, and I am already picking out some journey photos that fit the theme.

I hope that the weather stays halfway decent this month. February usually delivers the worst winter weather for our area of the country. Thank goodness it is a short month. And lookie there at the calendar, Valentine’s Day is only two weeks away! Before we know it, March will be here with the beginning of spring-like weather in east Tennessee. Bring it on! In the meantime, we’re hunkering down and trying to stay warm.