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Archive for July, 2021

The Color of Cool

Posted in Likes, tagged , , , , , , , on July 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I’m feeling a lot better today, less exhausted ouchies and more “It’s cool, I’m good.” No naps today, no wishing I had a sling for my mostly incapacitated arm, just chilling and learning things.

Like using words to generate color palettes. Let’s see what we can do with that, shall we?

PhotoChrome

Using the Unsplash photo database, this site retrieves images related to your search term, combines them into a single image, then extracts a color palette. One nice thing is that you can deselect some of the component images, darken or brighten the palette, or zoom in to highlight just some of the colors in an image. I do find that the results tend to be a little muddy (“summer” is a lot duller grey and brown than I expected) but the tweaking helps.

* * *

Then what? I decided to learn how to color grade an image. Essentially, grading is a technique that lets you take the palette from one visual and apply it to another, often changing the tone and emotion of the image. A photo can go from warm summer afternoon to dark and stormy without a lot of fuss.

There are a lot of ways to do this but here’s a handy tutorial explaining the process in Affinity:

Steal the Color Grading from Any Image with Affinity Photo!

PhotoChrome has a link to download the composite image but it didn’t work for me. Instead, I used the “copy HEX” option for the color palette, then copied the darkest, lightest and middle colors into the Affinity photo Gradient Map / RGB Hex Sliders window.

What’s the color of cool? In my version of this exercise, this:

#4b5c74, #656778, #767482, #718694, #80949d

Here’s what that looks like when transferred onto an image.

Original Photo by Jenny Marvin on Unsplash
Cool

Then I had to try a couple of others for fun.

Ireland
Mars

It’s probably no surprise that I’m liking Mars best.

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Day 2

Posted in Other, tagged , , , , , on July 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »

“I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it.” 

― Mae West
Photo by Veronika Frank on Unsplash

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The Key Word Is “Temporarily”

Posted in Funny, Likes, tagged , , , , on July 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

https://xkcd.com/2479/

We’re not fully protected yet; we got our second shots today and need to wait a couple few weeks for full potency. (We were given Moderna because they’re saving all the Pfizer for the younglings. I am 100% down with that.) 

Of course, we’ll still be following all health department guidelines. Plus, yeah, stupid variants are out there throwing a stupid wrench into things. 

That said, this kind of progress feels oh so good. While at the vaccination center, it was really quite touching to see my fellow Canadians doing their part, for themselves, their families, and their community. Here’s to keeping us all safe!

(I still don’t want to clean, though! 🙂

* * *

The key word here is “temporarily” … Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

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The Many Kinds of Cool

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , on July 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

The other day, a twenty-something told me I was cool. I don’t say this to brag (ok, maybe just a little), but because it surprised the heck out of me, and also gave me an extra shot of hope for the future.

Why? 

Because this particular twenty-something doesn’t know much about me personally. And let’s face it, we’ve already established that I’m not that great.

* * *

What’s cool?

Well, I do have the US Army Survival Manual on my bookshelf, next to Tolkien and Bill Bryson, Ann Patchett, Dava Sobel, Jasper Fforde, Ilona Andrews, R2D2, a lucky cricket, and Edible & Medicinal Plants of Canada, but he doesn’t know that. Or that I can dye wool with the plants in my yard then design and knit it into a sweater, write science fiction and fantasy, have circumnavigated the globe, perfected chocolate cake and hybrid sourdough sandwich loaf recipes, turned my own wooden rolling pin, or any of the other things that you, dear readers, know about my sojourn on this planet.*

This particular person is a day-job colleague. What he knows about me is that I care about society, inequality, the environment and how we live in it. In short, he knows that I’m trying to make a positive difference.

That’s what he thinks is cool.

And that gives me just a little bit of extra hope for the future.

* * *

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

* * *

* This is a subset of my own personal list of good things; your definition may vary and that’s cool!

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Much Better, Thanks

Posted in Likes, Reviews, tagged , , , , , on July 7, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I may have understated things a little yesterday, when I said that my bug bites were just “extremely itchy.” They were driving me crazy, especially the freakishly large spider(?) bite that made my wrist look like a poorly-maintained baseball bat. I had some anti-itch stuff and it worked, but for short periods only, and the wrist had a puffy red circle that was three inches wide and still growing.

Not cool.

Cue dramatic rescue! My sister-in-law saved the day. Her recommendation? Vicks VapoRub. The full course of action was peroxide to clean the area, then apply a mix of Vicks and salt.

Being a science-minded sort in possession of a bumper crop of bug bites, I decided to conduct a little experiment.

Super official test protocol: Some spots got Vicks only, some got the full treatment. I won’t lie, the salt scared me a little. It seemed a bit too much like scratching an itch with your nails, deeply satisfying until the blood starts to run, the area resembles a monster-movie prosthetic, and you regret your life choices.

Ahem.

Results: I wasn’t 100% wrong about the salt. Scrubbing the swollen area rode a fine line between satisfaction and pain, and I could almost see the little grains scraping an already sore spot. (It was also a bit awkward to apply to and remove from non-wrist areas.) But! Once I stopped rubbing it in, I was able to leave it at that. No obsessive need to keep scratching even as the voice in my head said, “For the love of all that’s holy, please stop scratching!” Was it nerve overload, increased Vicks penetration, or…? I don’t know, but I liked it.

And then the swelling went down, the redness receded, and the itch went away. There’s still a little redness, a tiny bump where the demon venom spider fangs went in, and no real urge to scratch. The Vicks-only bumps are similar, so my guess is that the menthol etc. in the mix does most of the work. I’ll probably use that straight next time.

My verdict? Best sister-in-law ever:)

* * *

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

* * *

* Note from the future: After more experimentation (thanks, backyard bugs!) I’m shifting my position a little. Salt helps, and the peroxide (or other cleanser) seems sensible if you’re going to use sharp crystals against your skin. 

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Itching for Good

Posted in Likes, tagged , , , , , on July 6, 2021| 1 Comment »

We picked up a bunch of native plants from a local eco organization and added them to the garden over the weekend. To go along with existing pollinator plants like butterfly weed, chives, and Joe Pye Weed, I am now the proud owner of flowers like wild bergamot, yellow tickseed, and black-eyed Susan.

Also approximately one million extremely itchy bug bites, and as anyone who knows me knows, I really hate mosquitoes.

But.

Birds and butterflies and pollinators in general need food and shelter. These plants will live outdoors and I had to get them moved into their new homes; the mosquitoes just took advantage of my helpful nature. (Also my delicious blood.)

So both arms are itchier than I’d like, plus I have a row of awkwardly-placed extra bumps on my spine (particularly fun) and what I’m pretty sure is a spider bite on my wrist, which is now extra red, itchy and swollen.

Still worth it!

* * *

Photos by Evan Buchholz, Joshua J. Cotten, Aaron Burden, Karl-Heinz Müller, Ilana Grostern, Gaétan Marceau Caron, Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

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Cuba, 1937

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on July 5, 2021| 1 Comment »

This is an entry from my book of beginnings. It’s fiction, but inspired by my grandmother (yes, the whippersnapper).

She was loving and kind and sweet. She also lived through an alcoholic father, abandonment, and the Great Depression, and was a lot tougher than she looked. She and my grandfather were enthusiastic travelers. The family story was that she kept a series of journals about their trips, starting with their honeymoon. In Cuba.

If I’d ever found those journals, it would not have surprised me if she was also a spy.

* * *

Cuba 1937

I was 24 when my grandmother died, the same age she’d been when she got married. My father called to give me the sad news. She’d been sick, but she lived a full life. She was the neighborhood bridge and poker champion in her neighborhood circle for most of the half-century she lived there and she led the women’s golf game every year. The next day I went to the house, to help my father sort through her things.

She was my favorite grandmother, and not just because she was a fantastic baker. My brother and I would sit at her kitchen table, eating pound cake and cookies while she told us stories. That’s what I liked best, the stories. She and Grandpa were travelers, starting when they got married and only stopping months before their deaths. That’s what they lived for, and listening to Grandma talk about souks, the Amazon rainforest, the glaciers of Alaska and the mountains of Italy, I thought I knew why.

“She left you something.”

My father had opened the door in a T-shirt, dressed for what was sure to be a messy task. Sorting through the remnants of eight decades would take us a while. I followed him into the kitchen and poured myself a cup of tea. I stood at the table waiting for the hot liquid to cool, and wondered what minor treasure I might receive.

“You’re lucky. The box they were in was sealed up nice and tight.”

The bundle was solid, and heavy. I set it on the table and unwrapped the musty fabric covering.

“I didn’t know anyone used oilcloth anymore.”

“These go back a long time.”

Inside the oilcloth envelope was a stack of books. They were different sizes and shapes, starting with a school notebook and progressing to leather-bound hardcovers. Each one had a short title written on the cover in my grandmother’s elegant script.

Looking over my shoulder, my father smiled.

“She knew how much you enjoyed her stories, so she wanted you to have her travel journals. This should be every trip she took over more than fifty years.”

Treasure indeed. Realizing that the most recent accounts were on top, I re-stacked the journals to uncover the oldest, her first trip. The black and white cardboard cover was grayed with age and blank except for her name. The pages were stiff, and for a moment I was afraid that the paper had completely fused together. A little work at the edges, though, and I was able to gently open it to the first page. Yellow with age, the corners cracked but the ink was still dark and bold.

She’d put the title inside, as if unwilling to announce it on the book’s cover.

“Cuba,” it read, “1937.”

This was where it all began.

* * *

Photo by Dorothea OLDANI on Unsplash

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Happy Fourth!

Posted in Holidays, tagged , , , on July 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I’m out enjoying a beautiful Fourth of July. Hope you are too!

* * *

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

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Counting Sheep

Posted in Holidays, Likes, tagged , , , , on July 3, 2021| Leave a Comment »

It’s a holiday weekend, bookended by Canada Day and the Fourth of July. As a dual citizen, I feel obligated to celebrate as much as possible, which means I am trying to work as little as possible. Today, that means learning something fun. Like perspective bending, with sheep.

* * *

Original photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

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Summer Magic

Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged , , , , , , on July 2, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday I took a brief break to check on my butterfly weed (blooming happily!) and noticed an interesting beetle by the door.

“Ooh,” I asked myself, “could that be a firefly?”

It could. It was.

Last night, between brightly-colored expressions of Canadian joy (aka celebratory fireworks), we spotted brightly-colored expressions of firefly joy above the cedar hedge. The lone Lampyridae had a hard time competing, but he gave it his best shot.

* * *

I have great memories of family nights outside in the garden when I was a kid, watching hundreds of fireflies looking for love. It was magic.

We don’t have hundreds now, but I’m working to make our yard as firefly-friendly as I can, particularly around mating season (aka now). Here’s how:

Save The Fireflies

Some of the things you can do:

  • turn off outdoor lights (who can get any action when that giant porch light is acting like the worst wingman ever?)
  • leave logs and leaves on the ground (I’ve totally got this covered)
  • add water (we have birdbaths, so check)
  • say no thanks to pesticides (no problemo, that stuff’s nasty)
  • let your lawn grow (skip mowing this weekend? yes please!)
  • add trees (I’ll see what I can do to keep the ones we have happy)

Time to recapture a bit of that summer magic.

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