Author Archive

Completely miserable day obviously tied to the lawn being mowed!

Grass allergy is consistent with the oral reactions to oranges and tomatoes I have had in the past.

slight congestion when waking up, but much less than yesterday

breakfast: eggs & bacon

lunch: same sandwich as yesterday

green tea

dinner: plaice, vegetable bouillon, carrots, fennel, asparagus, spring onion

a couple of sneezes before bed

woke up 7am

8am coughing and sneezing

all food same as yesterday

bacon: Brunchy Bacon

bread: Minimum toast

lunch meats: Frokost Favorit

boller i karry: Beauvais

green tea: Fred’s organic

Breakfast

2 eggs

2 slices bacon

Iced green tea sweetened with Danish honey

 

Lunch

Sandwich 2 slices each bread, saltkød, chicken + mayo

 

Dinner

Boller I karry

Iced green tea

 

Popcorn

I’m trying to figure out what I’m allergic to. I don’t have a better place to put this, so here we go.

Breakfast:

2 eggs

2 slices bacon

water

 

Lunch:

Sandwich – 2 slices each bread, roast beef, ham + mayonnaise

water

 

licked icing (sugar + water) off fingers after decorating cookies

 

Dinner:

Sandwich – 2 slices each bread, chicken breast, ham

water

 

sneezing + congestion around 9pm

I’ve made an updated version of my siggy tutorial, for those on any ProBoards forum.

And my other screenshots will be on a Mac computer using a Chrome browser, but it will work fine on any computer, so ignore any subtle differences. K? K.

1. Find a picture. You need a digital picture (ending in .jpg or .jpeg or .gif or .png) somewhere on your computer. It can be scanned in or fresh off your digital camera, or it can be something you edited beyond recognition. It doesn’t matter. It just needs to end in one of those extensions and you need to know where it is on your computer.
   
   Personally, I like to mess with my pics. I’ll teach you that later in another lesson maybe. Anyway, here is my pic in Finder (Explorer, in Windows-ese).
2. Get it online. There are several sites out there that will let you do this, but let’s use tinypic. Go there, and fill in the form like so:
   
   You want to make sure you set the “resize” option so you don’t get a crazy big siggy. Hit “Upload now!” and prove you’re a human.
3. Copy the IMG Code. Click on that very first box under “IMG Code for Forums and Message Boards” and copy it.
   
4. Paste it into your siggy. Go to your profile using the “profile” icon up in the top banner.
   
   Click on “Modify Profile.”
   Go down under “Personal information” to the signature box and paste that IMG Code in.
   
   Scroll all the way down, hit the “Modify Profile” button, and you’re done! Enjoy! 
5. Extra stuff! This is optional stuff you can add to your siggy now that you have a picture in there.
   • Want some text too? No problem! If you want it above your picture, start typing it before that code you just pasted in. If you want it below your picture, start typing it below that code.
     
   • How about a link?  Use this code: [url=(put the URL here)](thing you want linked)[/url] You can link text or images or both. In the image below, the “Text above pic.” will link to Google. Neither the image nor the text below will be linked.

Please be advised that the following post contains “the f word.”

I’ve had some people ask me how I correct spelling errors in meme images floating around Facebook. My intention is not to debate whether this is a worthy use of time. Suffice to say that it bugs ME enough to fix them. If it doesn’t bug you, then feel free to go somewhere else on the Internet. It’s a big place. If it bugs YOU, and you like to learn new things, stick around for a spell.

It’s a bit hard to generalize the process since it depends what the image looks like and what’s wrong with it, but here’s an example to get y’all started.

First, you need an image editor. I use Pixelmator, which is only available for the Mac (sorry Windows and *nix users), but if you happen to be a Mac user, I do highly recommend it. It’s not free, but it’s really cheap for as awesome as it is, and you can use it to touch up photos, make your own memes, or whatever. You can get it from the App Store. If you’re not a Mac user, or you’re broke, GIMP is free and available for Windows, *nix OSes, and Macs. A lot of people swear by it, and the price is hard to beat. I haven’t used it in about 10 years so I’m not sure I can give a fair comparison between it and Pixelmator. Go ahead and try it first. You may already have an image editor. Sometimes scanners, tablets, or other accessories come with one. Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements are popular image editors. If you are not using Pixelmator, my screenshots will look different from whatever you’re using, but as long as you’re using a layer-based editor, you should be able to do everything I’m doing.

I’m going to show how I added a letter and removed a letter in the following image.

There are two errors in the text. If you don’t see them, don’t worry. It’ll be obvious when I show you how I’m fixing them.

First, let’s add a letter. I zoom in so I can get picky about pixels and select exactly what I want. In this case, the missing letter is in the middle of a word, so we need to make room for it. All the text on the image is left-justified and I’d like to keep true to that if possible. Although we need to make room in an already-long word, I think we can make it work. I select the part of the word that follows where our inserted letter will go. I used the rectangular selection tool twice. Once around the bulk of it, and then I added to the first selection to get around the cross of the ‘t’. After selecting, I copy and paste. This makes a second layer of just the part that I selected.

The letter that I need to insert, ‘i’, is already somewhere else on the image. Yay! This saves me some work. Sometimes I have to get creative and, for example, flip a ‘b’ around to make a ‘d’ or ‘p’ or ‘q’. If I’m adding a period, I might snag the dot off an ‘i’ or I might just draw one freehand. Every once in a while, I’ll recognize the font as one that I have and then I can type a new letter, but usually I copy an existing one or try to construct it from the existing letters. Since there’s already an ‘i’, I’ll select it, copy, and paste, just as I did before.

I now have three layers: the whole image, one with just ‘ties.’ and one with just ‘i’. When I select a layer in the layers list, I get little dots showing the boundaries of that layer. As I said before, it may look different in another program, but there should still be some way of seeing which layer you’re working with.

I move my ‘i’ layer over to where I need to insert my ‘i’.

I move my ‘ties.’ layer over and now you can see the whole word! Whew, it all fits. The ‘i’ layer is partially obscuring the cross of the ‘t’, so I select part of it and delete.

I like what I see, so I merge my layers.

Next, let’s remove a letter. I select the part of the word that follows the extra letter, copy, and paste. Sounds familiar, right?

I move the ‘nunciate’ layer over to cover up the extra letter. My word looks good now, but there’s an extra ‘e’ at the end! Don’t worry, we’ll fix that.

You can also see how the background is not a completely even color and you can see the righthand corners of my layer because the color is too dark.

Both of these things can be addressed with the rubber stamp tool. You can see it in the screenshot below, slightly larger than the other tools in my toolbox. It should look similar in other programs. The way this tool works is you select a spot on your canvas, and then you start brushing around somewhere else, and it copies from that first spot into your new spot. Confusing? If you play around with it a little bit, you’ll probably figure out what it’s doing. Pixelmator shows a little crosshairs at the spot where it’s copying from at any given moment.

It takes a bit sometimes to find a good spot to copy from. If it doesn’t look good the first try, you can ctrl-click somewhere else on your canvas to pick a new spot to copy from and try again. After I erase the extra ‘e’ this way, I merge the layers and tackle that darker corner issue. You can still tell it’s not perfect, but sometimes you have to say that enough is enough. Plus, I’m still zoomed in, so things are more obvious. It’s good to zoom out periodically and check if what you’re doing is even noticeable anymore.

There you have it! A lovely, spellchecked version of the original meme, and one you can be proud to share.

If you’re having trouble, feel free to ask for help. I’m happy to lend assistance with Pixelmator or general image editing questions, though I cannot help with GIMP- (or other editor-) specific questions. Enjoy your new OCD hobby!

Remember the dress? Of course you do. It’s ADORABLE.

Well, not so long after I posted about the dress, I realized that I had two dresses and two daughters. And that my daughters were the right combination (a younger chubby one and an older skinny one) that I may be able to get them each to wear a dress at the same time.

Now, I’m not normally a “dress them up the same” kinda person. They’re very different people with very different personalities, and I love and respect that. But as a “once in a while for a photo shoot” kinda thing, I’m all over it like gravy on a biscuit.

First I tried to do it myself.

Then, I decided to take the dresses to the States and pay to have it done. Since everything is cheaper in the States, I figured it would be better to do it there.

We made an appointment at Olan Mills, but after waiting well over an hour past our appointment time and being continuously ignored, we left and went to Sears. Thank you, Olan Mills, for sucking so severely. I could not have possibly been happier with whatever you would have done, especially since I would have been really pissed off by the time you saw me, and probably not as photogenic.

It’s a good thing we went to the States when we did, because Maggie’s already outgrown the smaller dress. Pretty soon, she and Dagmar will be wearing the same size.

It’s purely coincidence that Transatlantic Blonde mentioned Mickey Mouse Clubhouse when I was already planning to rant about it for today’s Feminist Friday. I had no idea she would! But as it happens, I’ve been steaming about it for a few days.

It’s just one little scene in one little episode, but I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. The gang is getting on a boat. Mickey hops on. Pete offers his hand to Minnie and Daisy. Then Donald reaches for Pete’s hand, and Pete gives Donald a dirty look. There’s enough pause and sound effects and whatnot to make it clear that this is supposed to be a joke.

Seriously? In 2011, people still make this junk? What is so ridiculous about a man needing or wanting help onto a boat? Do we seriously need to teach our kids that women need help onto boats but men can’t possibly need help onto boats? It really baffles me that enough people involved in the production of this cartoon think this is a valid use of their animation time. It isn’t as if Donald is known as a very physically strong character, and that’s what made it funny. The only context I can come up with is men vs. women.

My new site idea is taking a lot longer to implement than I want, because of a lot of other junk going on, so I’m just gonna hop back in here and make a new post. Melaina over at Transatlantic Blonde has been nagging me to join her Feminist Friday. And I say nagging in the most loving way possible, because I know she knows that I actually do want to participate and actually do need some prodding to get around to doing it.

Forgive me, as I’m using an app on my iPad to blog this, and I have never used it before, so I might not figure out how to add links and pretty stuff just yet, but here we go.

This week’s topic is on raising feminist children. I want to address something I’ve read many times that really bugs me. I’m talking about comments that go something like this, “I don’t want to stay home with my children because I don’t want them to think that women NEED to stay home.”

If you don’t want to or can’t stay home with your children, then fair enough. But if this is really your only reason for not doing it, I kinda have to WTF for a minute here. If you are a doctor, will your kids think women NEED to be doctors? Or that women NEED to work outside the home? OF COURSE NOT. Surely you do not honestly believe that your career choice (or non-career choice) is the deciding factor in what your children will believe is possible for women. Whether you stay home or not, there are many other things you’ll be doing to show your kids what is possible.

At the present time, I’m a SAHM. I don’t know how long that will last, due to many reasons, but anyway, it’s true now. But my girls see their aunts who have jobs, their grandmothers who are retired from jobs, their friends’ mothers, some of whom have jobs, had jobs, are looking for jobs…. We go out to museums, amusement parks, restaurants, doctors’ offices, supermarkets, and shops where women are visibly employed. I have to say, I do not stress at all that my girls will think they have no choice but to stay home with their children in the years to come.

Actually, I am more worried that if they WANT to stay home, it won’t be an option. But perhaps that’s a topic for another day.

(There is something I do find myself having to work at, though, and that’s keeping other bias out of my parenting. I mean little things like, when we were at a zoo, and my gut reaction was to say “ew!” at an ugly insect. But I realized I don’t want my daughter saying “ew!” just because I think it’s nasty. She might like insects, and that’s ok. So I try to remember to say “look at this!” instead. She can decide if it’s nasty for herself.)