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      Friday, October 12, 2018


craftstuff
10:08 AM - 10/12/2018

The topic: And now, the craftstuff

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Light hand? A light hand? I guess mine are made of cement.

So, I got those cards done last week when I wasn't tweaking plugins. Wait, I did the cards first, then the graphic plugins. That's right, that's how I did it. I think. Whew, my brain is on FIRE today....

I couldn't finish the cards because I didn't have enough ink to stamp them all. The ink got here last week, so the stamping was done after I figured out the best way to do it (the stamp itself is big and I kept getting a blank spot in the center of what I'd stamped).  On a wooden table, not my work table, with my Fiskars stamp press. I've had this for close to four years and it comes in mighty handy.

I screwed up a couple, but I came away with twenty decent cards. The top part has scor tape on it, setting it down just so on double sided adhesive foam is tricky and if the two meet at the wrong angle? Done. You don't pull them apart. I found a nice snowflake design in my digital paper files I got on Etsy a few years ago and ordered paper to print it on. I know most of my envelopes are made from cardstock, but I didn't care for the heavy stuff I had and I ordered some lighter weight stock from Amazon. I really should have checked what I had on hand before clicking on submit.

I found a really nice paper in my stash, coated on two sides for inkjet printing. It was letter sized, so I pulled out my We R Memory Keepers envelope punch board to check the size of paper needed and it was 8.25" x 8.25". Letter size will work! I printed out about thirty sheets and cut them down to the right size and these will work nicely with the cards I made.

Now we come to the light hand. I cut out enough pieces of cardstock to make thirty boxes. It took a day just for that. Then I came up with this brilliant plan of embossing them, then using a brayer to roll glitter glue over them. The problem is the folder I used isn't ideal for this. The pattern is too far apart, so not just the stars got glittered. There's glitter in between. The online instructions all call for a light hand. Not working. I've been messing with these a couple of hours each day and I finally decided no one is really going to care, probably won't even notice.

So, I'm going to finish rolling the brayer on this paper today, then everything will be ready for assembly. Then, this project will be done! All three parts. Yay!

I still have a Christmas tree from last year to put together. The one I'm giving to the vet's office for Christmas.

But I don't need to cut any more paper.

When I'm done with this stuff, I think I'll get back to playing with the etching.

craftstuff   


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catstuff
09:45 AM - 10/12/2018

The topic: On to catstuff

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Opie hasn't been doing well. Not much of an appetite, still sounds snotty and his ears are driving him nuts. A deep down itchy thing going on.

He doesn't have mites, he's been getting ear drops and nothing seems to help. Earlier this year, when he had the abscess in an anal sac (I think that's what it was, whatever it was, it was nasty), they also cleaned out his ears and sent me home with meds for those. Months later, he still has the problem.

And he's still congested. So, I called the vet yesterday and she prescribed a different ear med. While I was waiting for the call back, I got to thinking maybe it wasn't something that needed antibiotics, but maybe it was allergies. I called back and gave the receptionist my bright idea. I called a few hours later and she agreed that it may well be allergies since meds aren't working.

She prescribed this stuff called hydroxyzine. A very small dose, twice a day. One of the side effects is drowsiness. Nah, not. Not Opie.

I will say I like that he's eating a lot more. And his ears, while still itchy, aren't as bad as they were. I don't know if this is a gradual getting better or something that works right away. I guess I'll find out. I'm still going to give him the antibiotics, because he's still congested, even though his ears aren't as bad.

When Brian went to pick up the med yesterday, he found out that our old vet not only retired, he sold the clinic to one of the vets he'd hired about four years ago, the wonderful woman who helped us so much with Skipper and DaNiece.  The other vet, who just started earlier this year (or was it last year?) is leaving. His wife is a vet for Sea World and she's being transferred, so he'll be gone shortly.

I guess there's another vet there who we haven't met yet.

All these changes....

 

opie    catstuff   


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geekstuff
09:02 AM - 10/12/2018

The topic: Bunches of stuff

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Let's start with geekstuff.

Last week I let myself get bogged down in tweaking my graphics program. There was an awesome offer of an upgrade to Corel's Paint Shop Pro Ultimate for less than thirty dollars. It also included a lite version of Corel's PhotoMirage, which had piqued my interest when it first came out, but research told me that you could find better programs for less money that did the same thing that cost less than seventy bucks. So, I passed. I just checked the Corel website and the version of PSP I got at a special, limited upgrade price, is going for a hundred bucks. So, I figured it was a pretty good deal and I jumped on it.

Windows 10 runs programs that are 32 bit or 64 bit. I have no idea what that means. What I do know is that my plugins, those cute little programs that do really fun things to graphics, like make a photo look like an oil painting, run on 32 bit versions of software. They won't run on 64. Yeah, I know, a 64 bit processor runs faster than a 32 bit, but a 32 bit plugin will NOT work when input into a 64 bit version of the software. So, I installed both versions on the laptop. Then I had to install the plugins.

Now, dear reader,  I don't know how familiar you are with software like plugins. But plugins are like the drawers or closets you never clean out. You just keep squishing more and more stuff into them. Some of the stuff is no longer useable, but you wouldn't know that because you rarely used them in the past and don't give them a second thought. Old teeshirts, coffee mugs (I have SO many mugs right now, I have no more room in the cupboards, this is a serious problem at this point), screwdrivers, hammers, you know, just stuff. And I finally decided to clean out my plugins.

I have them all in their own little computer cabinet with a label on it "Plugins". And as I upgrade my graphics programs or upgrade computers, I just save that file and copy it over to the new system. Obviously, some need to be officially reinstalled, the ones I paid for, the ones that need a license code, and that all takes time. And then you get the ones you've moved so often, they can no longer be activated without contacting the mothership where those codes are reset.

There was another instance where plugin #2 didn't work if plugin #1 wasn't activated. But plugin #1 would not activate. It was very frustrating. What I ended up doing there is copying a file from the registry on the PC in the office (I run this stuff on two devices), exporting it, deleting that entry on the laptop registry and importing the one from the PC. Plugin #1 won't activate, but it no longer matters because plugin #2 is a bigger, badder version of plugin #1 and it works nicely. I had contacted the company where I got them originally, but I bought the first one in 1999. So, there ya go.

And then there are the demos I never bought, or I did buy and they came with a new install, so the demo was still showing up in the plugin menu.

I finally got them all cleaned up. It took me days, but I got it done. It took me most of the week.

Then yesterday, the laptop internet was running slow so I figured it would be a great time to reboot the cable modem and the router. This shouldn't be a big deal.

It was. The laptop could no longer connect to the LAN. It couldn't see the other computers, it couldn't see the external hard drives that run as my own personal cloud on the router.

I reset the range extender a couple of times, finally got that working. But then, when I tried to connect to the other computers, I got a message asking for my credentials.

My what? Credentials? I didn't need them an hour ago, why do I need them now? What kind of fresh hell is this?

I did the obligatory Google search and found out how to make that stop. A privacy setting on my laptop that I needed to disable. Yeah, okay, got it.

Why is it enabled in the first place? Who did that? It wasn't me. Oh, yeah, right. Windows update. That's the only thing I could figure out. But fixed that and now all is back to normal.

 

geekstuff    computer   


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lisaviolet is seventy something, married with no kids, takes care of lots of cats, likes taking photographs, loves Southern California weather and spends altogether too much time avoiding her responsibilities.

In her spare time, she makes pretty things to sell in her store.

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