Photoshop Upgrade

I just upgraded from Photoshop 2 to Photoshop 7. A huge upgrade. I'm so excited. I've been missing so much. There are so many new cool things I can do with my upgraded Photoshop. I've been playing with actions, they are so fun, but I still have a lot to learn. Check out these fun images. This is one I took of Riley at the Pumpkin Patch.

This one is the SOOC (straight out of the camera) image. Nothing done to it.


Here's what I did with it:

The first one is a very subtle enhancement, brighten and a little color pop.



The second one is alot of brighten and color pop



Not sure what to call the next one, but I love it!




This one is just fun, it's a grunge/urban look.


I'm having a really hard time deciding which one I like the best. They are all pretty cool. Which one is your favorite?

Random 10

Been awhile, so here's one:

Random 10:

1. Losing My Way - Justin Timberlake
2. The Kiss(Skit) - Eminem
3. The Anthem - Good Charlotte
4. Without You - Motley Crue
5. Love Don't Live Here Anymore - Madonna
6. She's Crafty - Beastie Boys
7. Anything, Anything - Buckcherry
8. Re-Arranged - Limp Bizkit
9. Time After Time - Cyndi Lauper
10. My Place - Nelly

This was supposed to be a longer post but I got distracted

A commercial on the radio this morning said that Dwight Howard's vertical leap is 5 ft. His vertical leap is as high as I am tall.

How you Compare

I already know who I'm voting for, but I thought this quiz at Glassbooth would be interesting to take. First you have 20 points to weight the issues that are most important to you and then it asks you questions about those issues. The more points you give a particular issue, the more questions it asks you about that topic. The one thing that was disappointing was that there was no widget to add your results to your blog like many other quizzes out on the web. It does allow you take take the quiz on Facebook and share with friends, but that's it.

So I took the quiz and it told me that I had the most similarity with Barack Obama, 89% similarity. The breakdown looked like this for me (the issues are in no particular order):

Taxes and Budget	75%
Science	81%
Civil Liberties and Domestic Security	100%
Iraq and Foreign Policy	75%
Internet and Media	88%
Environment and Energy	88%
Health Care	100%
Education	88%
Abortion and Birth Control	100%

For the most part on the issues we didn't agree on 100% (it only asked me 1 question on Health Care and Civil Liberties and Domestic Security), I was a stronger supporter. There were no issues that we just had completely opposite beliefs on. Unlike McCain, were there were several where we were completely at opposite ends on. I had the least amount of similarity with McCain, but I was surprised at the number, 50%. I thought it would have been lower. I wish it also had a quiz for the Vice Presidential candidates as well.

Above Average, Thank you Mrs. Bloomfield

I'm sure this is really old, but I came across this while wandering around some blogs today and as I looked through the list of books all I could think of is, Thank You Mrs. Bloomfield. She was my highschool english teacher and if it weren't for her I wouldn't have read most of the books I've read on this list. It's pretty sad that it was highschool when I read most of these. I have memories of sitting on the couch in my parent's living room trying to finish up A Tale of Two Cities before the test the next day. I'm almost positive I read the whole thing in one night. I actually loved it, but when it came to reading I was a terrible procratinator in high school. I also remember writing a paper about John Steinbeck and also a term paper about two JD Salinger books, Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zoe, both of which I loved. No memory is as strong though as my attempt to read Moby Dick. I just could not read that book. I hated it. I really struggled, so much in fact my dad felt bad for me and actually bought me the Cliff's Notes, so I could get through the test.

The list also reminded me that I really need to pick out a book to read while Riley is at gymnastics. Right now I just waste the 45 minutes doing nothing, I could be reading a really great book.

Here is the Meme:

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on the list.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Colorize (RED) the books you love.
4) Asterisk (*) the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte*
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40 Animal Farm - George Orwell
41 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46 Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49 Atonement - Ian McEwan
50 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert*
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jone's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville*****
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce*
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo*

LANGUAGE!

It's no surpise to anyone that Doug has quite a potty mouth. He just can't seem to control his swearing around Riley. It really annoys him, but whenever he says a bad word, I immediately say "LANGUAGE!" to remind him to be careful what he says around her. She is at the age now where she picks up easily on words and is able to reuse. Luckily, I haven't heard her say any really bad words and there have been no reports from her school of such language and I'd like to think it's because I've made it very clear that these words are bad words and shouldn't be said. Doug thinks that I shouldn't make such a big deal about the swear words and if I don't call them out she won't even notice them. I strongly disagree, I think that if I don't call them out as unacceptable words that she will think they are okay and just start using them.

While playing Mario Kart on Sunday:

Daddy: "F*@!"
Riley: "Daddy, Language!"

I almost fell off the chair in laughter. To say Doug was annoyed would be an understatement. Now he gets it from both of us. Unfortunately, I am not immune to this. Making lunch this morning, I was having a hard time opening a jar of dip.

Mommy: "Shit, I can't get this jar open! What the hell!"
Riley: "Language Mommy!"
Mommy: "I know sorry."

But now she's taken it to a whole new level. I also said things like:
Mommy: "I can't get this jar open. How annoying?"
Riley: "Is that a bad word?"
Mommy: "no annoying is not a bad word"
Mommy: "Crap why won't this open" "What the heck?"
Riley: "Is that a bad word?"
Mommy: "No crap and heck are not bad words"

I started to get annoyed that she kept asking if words were bad just so she could say language mommy, so I proceeded to explain to her what words were bad which I'm not sure was the best idea.

Mommy: "Riley, the bad words are F!@#, Shit, Bitch, Hell" (These are the words that are most commonly said around her, so I just used those as examples. No need to introduce ones she's never heard at this point)
Riley: "oh"
Mommy: "Daddy says those alot huh?"
Riley: "yeah"
Mommy: "They are bad words and we shouldn't say them especially outside of the house"
Riley: "You forgot F@#! (mommy trying to ignore what Riley just said) Mommy, You forgot F@!#"
Mommy: "Yes that's a bad word too. Don't say it just say Gosh instead okay"
Riley: "Ok, Gosh"

13 for the 13th

It's already October 13th and I haven't made a single blog posting for October yet. I'm such a slacker. A list of random things in my head:

• Went to Jimmy Fallon at RIT on Saturday night. He was hillarious. Our tickets were printed with the wrong start time, but it worked out to our advantage. The four of us were there very early and we ended up with second row center seats for the show. I just wish I was more prepared to hide my camera. I didn't think cameras would be a big deal, so I didn't make much effort to hide it. I ended up not bringing it in. Luckily, Deb's friend was able to bring hers in. I'm dying to see the photos and videos from the show. The minute Fallon walked out on stage, I immediately had this feeling come over me which reminded me why he was in my top 5 for so long. He's been off my top 5 for sometime, but seeing him live reminded me why he was there. He's awesome! Love the RIT hoodie! Photo from Rochester Metro Mix

• Andy took Riley to a haunted hayride which she loved! As soon as she woke up on Sunday she started telling me all about it. She ended her story with, "I like Andy. (pause) he doesn't have any hair on his head" :)
• We had planned to go pumpkin picking yesterday, but it was 80 degrees outside. Pumpkin picking is supposed to be a fall thing with cooler weather, so we decided to hold off until next Sunday when its supposed to be 57 and sunny. Seems more like fall to us. So instead we just hung out at home, resisting turning on the air conditioning for as long as possible. We did end up turning it on for a few hours. We played Mario Kart and were trying to figure out how to unlock content with no luck.
• I somehow got motivated on Sunday to sort through my clothes, organize my closet and get all my clothes off the floor in our bedroom. I packed up 4 bags of clothes to give away. I came to a couple realizations during this process. 1. Doug's clothes take up 3/4th of the floor space in our bedroom. Now that my clothes are cleaned up you can see the rug in a small square near the bedroom door.
• 2. I have a WAY better maternity clothes wardrobe than I do regular wardrobe. If I were pregnant right now I'd had way more clothes to wear and more stuff that I actually liked. I have a pretty crappy, small regular wardrobe. I need to work on that :)
• While cleaning up my clothes I found $20 which we immediately turned around and used to get Macaroni Grill take out that night. Basically free money, not counted in our budget.
• I also found several scrapbooking sticker purchases that I had forgotten about and 4 concert ticket stubs (INXS Foxwoods, Justin Timberlake Buffalo and New Hampshire, and Fall out Boy Rochester)
• I ended up with one bag full of old Riley clothes that somehow found their way into our room.
• Now if I can only get Doug to organize and purge his clothing.
• Riley had her second swim class this weekend. She loved it. The first day she was super scared and I didn't she'd get in the water. This time she jumped right in and was kicking and playing around.
• Love that according to Riley, "Mommy's Ipod is better than Andy's"
• Wishing it wasn't Monday.
• Looking forward to RIT hockey starting this weekend.