Day 2 Day radishes

January 31/ Journaling

 I forgot on my last post to write about journaling.  As you have figured out I have entered a new phase of digital  scrapbooking.  Digital scrapbooking has come a long way baby.  

But I am following blogs, reading art magazines and  today everyone wants you to journal either on your scrapbook pages or in a journal.  .  Off and on I have journaled.  Certainly this personal blog is a journal.  Scrapbooking leaders harp on the need to journal your pictures.  A lot of times they talk about revealing your feelings.  My thoughts about revealing your feelings is that sometimes revealing your feelings is a lot of hog wash.  

Having said that I think you should imagine my card board box of photos (although now nicely put on disks) unidentified.  For the life of me, I can not remember enough details.  Now I would like some facts.  What was the story? This I think does have some value.  

Now here I am left in a quandary.  When Mr. Radish's mother died we threw away all of her photos  from around the world. She was standing among her cronies of the trip, but we did not know the people.  Perhaps if there was a Trade Center shot  we would feel this important. We kept the family photos and while some of them are marked, we do not have a family tree.  

So now I am feeling that we should be making our mark on our times and culture, family and life.  

I challenge you to take a photo a week.  Print it out and staple it to a page.  Doodle with a crayon and make a list of five words about that picture.  You could be having fun like me.  

I have started my process of photoing barns.  This was a photo from today.  It is a lovely house, but it also captures our weather.  

January 30/ The color yellow and journaling

I think yellow is my happy color.  My mother liked yellow to decorate and I am not sure if it was the color of the era, or she just liked it.  When Mr. Radish and I built a house I chose a color as similar to my mother's for Formica in my kitchen.  I wanted a happy kitchen.  The moment that lime yellow was installed, I hated it.  Hated it.  The reason was that the color was a cool yellow rather than a warm yellow, such as buttercup.  

Years later I redid my kitchen on a budget and painted the walls a creamy warm yellow and I was happy until the day I moved.  I wish now that I had pictures of my hand painted cabinet doors which I painted and then wrote all over.  Those were fun cabinets.

January 28/ Birthday

 

January 27/ Barns

This has nothing to do with barns, but I thought I would pass it along.  I bought Thomas Keller's new cookbook ad hoc at home. It is the first book of his that I have purchased, and I was dubious because the book is all wrapped and you can not see what you are buying.  However, I quite like the book.  With effort it is doable. He has some great tips in the book.  One of which is to use parchment paper to do all your work on.  Chopping vegetables for instance. The surfaces are kept much cleaner and I must say cleaning is speedier.   Parchment is a pretty pricey for me.  I am using wax paper and it is a tremendous help.  It is going to drive the paper free kitcheners mad.  

 

January 26/ Spoons

If you are looking for a tidy little mystery series at Netfix.  Check out Foyle' War. Even though it is a murder mystery series and about WWII it is pretty tame.  I am in love with the characters.   

I watched Jack last night on 24, and I ate two large handfuls of red Jelly beans.  There were a couple of tight spots.  Do not let your children see that.  

January 25/ Tires

I am down to the final days of my on line scrapbooking class in inspiration.  The class has been a kick.  I have come a long way.  Next I am moving on to doing it faster and easier. 

Dairy farmers here have many tires.  They are mostly used for weights to keep plastic down over hay that is stored for the winter.  Yesterday we went on a tire pile search.  The weather was very grey and it was cold.   The forsythia is out so that something good could happen:  croucus, pussy willows.  

January 23/ Bowls

 My daughter NoName has collected bowls in the places that she has lived in Mexico, Brazil,  China and Spain.  She has given me some lovely bowls.  In December I was reading either a blog or a magazine and the woman writer said that she always bought a bowl in January. She said that you almost always need some kind of bowl, for your kitchen, bathroom, garden, or just your spirit.   She said that it was a gift to herself for the new year.  I intended to pass this thought along to readers.  Then for Christmas I got this lovely bowl from Spain via my second daughter.  So  I forgot about it.  But a new bowl for the new year is a good idea.  The end of January is almost here! Think about it.  

January 22/ computer gurus

This is my revised layout.  I put it up because it is a little improved, but also it represents many hours on the phone to India.   

I have a wonderful new computer.  But something happened to my Photoshop Editing program.  This is no concern to you.  However, talking to repairmen in India may come to be everyone's problem.  The technicians know all the words.  That I will give them.  But they do not speak American.  Photoshop has not changed their Indian names to American.  I do not know how I feel about that as I find the other misleading.   But I can not  understand these technicians .  I use the speaker phone because then I am able to use my hands.  I was on the line one whole day.  I do not overstate this.  I do not know how many times I said, " Please repeat that, I beg your pardon, I do not understand you, say the last word over again.  The four technicians, one Latin American all spoke to me, and that is not counting the ones or the machines that you have to talk to getting to the gurus. They know how to pronounce very little. How rude is it okay to be? In the end, they solved no problem.  

Mr Radish in exasperation from listening to India on speaker finally took matters into his hands.  He bought me the updated program.  He uninstalled   the old program and loaded the new one.  

I know it is cheaper to hire people outside of our country to do the technical work.  But I do think that perhaps the time has come to teach some of our unemployed Americans how to do this work. While this could be more costly, at least we could ask the technicians to move it along, say do not give me the run around,  or do not blow me off.   We could take all of the robot callers that we now have and teach them the technical techniques.  I am joking, but there must be a lot of out of work technicians in our country who could to the work, and others who would do it just to keep from shooting themselves from boredom.

The first guy I wrote about a couple of days ago who was nice even it took me an hour to get his story and who I said was nice, the next technician told me he was an idiot.  

What to think?

Hurray! Senator Brown meet Senator Radish.

January 19/ Inspiration out

 

I am waiting for the results of the election in Massachusetts. The very idea of a Republican winning there could drive me back to drinking: a champagne celebration.