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Garden Aspirations

For the last few years my garden has fallen into disarray.  Some of that was laziness on my part and some was circumstance, but this year, my youngest child has expressed an interest in having her own garden patch and I therefore purchased seeds.

I can only garden in a smallish areas so I’m going to have extras.  If you are local to me and want some, or want to exchange seeds, let me know!  I would especially like to have someone else try to germinate the blue poppies with me.  They are amazing but I think I’ve had trouble with them in the past.

Vegetables & herbs: cherry tomato, cucumber, blue lake pole beans, snap peas, rainbow carrots, dill, parsley.     I have asparagus and strawberry plants for the taking

Flowers & ornamental: coleus, calendula, red yarrow, california poppies, blue himalayan poppies, nasturtium.

What I want: oxalis, compact ornamentals that do well in shade, things that are easy to grow and don’t take up tons of space.

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Gold Creek Trail

We hiked almost 4 miles today on Gold Creek Trail in Snoqualmie Pass.

My photos today were near misses.  I really need to pay more attention to my settings and actually look at the photos in the camera before I just presume that it’s OK.  And I need to zoom in to look at more details.  This one is my favorite and it’s because I love the color and swirls that came out in the sky.

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Fox

This is a vector tracing/coloring of a photograph, with some creative embellishments.  I’m not 100% happy with the colors or how I split them up, but it came out, overall, better than I expected.

I thought my trees could use some foxes.  This one is probably a bit too realistic in shape to go with that, but I will modify it to fit the tone as I get better.

#25/365

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February Soaps

I’m cheating a little.  I didn’t make all of these soaps just now, but I did re-take all my photos of them.  The Sandalwood & Rose clay is a new soap.  I was experimenting with madder root for color, thinking I’d get a pale pink and wanted a darker red swirl inside it.  That was the plan… but I had some separation from high temperatures and wound up having to hot process the soap and the swirl was destroyed.  C’est la vie.  On the plus side, it will be ready to use much sooner.   I still want this to count as something creative, but is it 1 new thing (sandalwood soap), 2 new things (soap & photos) or 7 new things? (soap + 6 photos?)  I’ll go for 2.  #21-22/365.

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Night scene

I added a background to the new oak tree with owls.   Getting the blur effect around the moon was fun.  I’m not entirely happy with the background trees but we were watching Bob Ross while I was thinking about them and it turns out that things he can do easily are going to take some time and thought for me.

#20/365

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Voices

My daughter found a website that will read blocks of text to you. She’s composing an essay and letting various actors read it back to her like a live audition. But I knew that I needed a Scottish accent! A bit of  searching and I found one that we can’t use for longer blocks, but there is a quick demo.

I’m trying to decide if there is some creative way to use this for our next RPG session.

We need to get one of the voice actors from ‘Honest Trailers’ to do a voice bank.

Update: it has been pointed out that my computer can download various accents for its own text to voice

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Mousetrap cars

I lead a 4-H club that is mostly devoted to hiking, kayaking and general outdoorsy stuff, but we sometime dabble in some kid-size engineering projects. In the past we’ve built pop-pop boats and a pumpkin-hurling trebuchet. This week I built a prototype mousetrap car.  The kids tested and critiqued the design and will have a month to build their own version and race them when we meet again.

I’ll get some video of the race next month.  I was able to get the still shot on the right because my duct tape construction method was failing and so the boom arm was no longer exerting enough force to move the rear wheels.

Back in 2002 I was backing up my computer to CD – this seems like a good use for that stack of old backups.

#18/365