I spent the weekend at my Grandma’s house and we did a little antique/boutique shop crawl! I didn’t go too crazy, but found a few great deals. The Golden books were $1 each. I seem to be collecting books with old cat illustrations now. I got the entire spool of heavy red pet leash-type material for $5.25. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but it seemed like such a good deal… The old blue canning jars were $2.50 each - I think I’ll be using them for craft supply storage! As for that bag of beads, when I first spied it, I immediately thought they were plastic due to the bright colors. I poked the bag, and was surprised to find that it was rather heavy. A big bag of Czech glass beads for $2!! The yellow depression glass sherbet glasses were $5 each. They are in a desirable parrot pattern, and I was informed by my father-in-law that they are worth $30 a piece. The pretty clear cut glasses were only $2 each.

I was charged with creating a Halloween-themed image of our company mascot to put into the monthly newsletter. This was probably the most exciting thing I did all day, so I thought I’d share a little bit about my creation process.

The art starts with a sketch on a crappy lined notepad that came from the office supply room. I didn’t draw very large, or get into much detail on this one. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

The sketch is scanned and brought into Photoshop. I use my Wacom pressure-sensitive tablet to draw line art on a new layer atop the sketch. I’ve decided to add in a bucket-o-treats, so I made the canvas a little larger to accommodate it.

When the lines are done, I drop out the back layer and save it. Then I open up Adobe Illustrator and place the Photoshop file into the Illustrator file. I use the trace feature in Illustrator to vectorize my line art. I expand that and ungroup it. Then I use the magic wand to select and delete all the white areas.

I create a new layer underneath the line art layer. Then I lock the line art layer and start adding in the blocks of color underneath using the pen tool. And, that’s about it. The company mascot is a rubber chicken, BTW… hehehe I made him look a bit too lively, I think.

Because the weather was so lovely today, my husband and I decided to go to “Pothole Park” and do some hiking and climbing. The park is really called Interstate State Park, but we call it Pothole Park because the park has potholes! It’s much easier to recall a park by its identifying features. Half way there, I realized I had forgotten my camera! My sweet husband offered to turn around and get it, but I thought that would’ve been rather silly. I just took some crummy photos with my cell phone.

One thing I love about the park is that the ground there is nearly completely stone with some deposits of silt/dirt here and there, and so the park is full of amazing trees growing up from the rock. I love how the roots are visible, twisting and vining every which way, supporting the trunk and gathering nutrients.

Here’s a pothole! I’d say this one is a mid-size pothole. There are many small ones, as big across as your foot. There are some that are much larger. The “Bottomless Pit” is 10 feet wide and 60 feet deep!

We saw a stickbug! I had never seen one in the wild before. Probably due to the amazing camouflage! We caught this one crawling up the side of a rock wall we were climbing. It followed us to the top and crawled up Ash’s leg, where I attempted to take a photo. Dumb phone cam. It’s blurry, but you can see it…

So we climbed around on the rocks until we were dripping in sweat, and then we walked into town and had a nice lunch at Schoony’s Malt Shop & Pizzeria. They have good pizza and delicious ice cream! Then we headed home.

So, back to Computrainer! Here’s my setup! I have the software on my hubby’s computer in the basement, and the computer is hooked up to a projector so I can ride courses on the big screen! I love it. I bought one Real Course video when I bought the trainer, it’s the Ironman Coeur d’Alene. I chose it for the scenery (I don’t think I’ll be doing an Ironman anytime soon!). I haven’t ridden the whole course yet, but it has been fun so far. The video speeds up or slows down according to your speed, and the resistance changes according to the terrain on the course. I seem to sweat more on the Computrainer than I do on the road. It must have a little more resistance than riding outdoors. That’s fine by me. Hopefully, I’ll have lots of time to ride inside over the winter, and I’ll be in great shape by spring.

Here’s a screencap of what I’m looking at. You can see a sample video of the course on this page.

Today, of course, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. To help celebrate this exciting day, I made these chocolate *ship* muffins for my mateys at work. Originally, I had intended to draw skull and crossbones on each muffin with white icing, but that was a big fail. So instead, I made up these little jolly rogers (pirate flags!) to go on each muffin.

I found the design for the flag on Wikipedia in a vector SVG file. Working in Adobe Illustrator, I resized it down to an inch wide, and copied it so there were two set directly next to each other. Then, I just copied and pasted that design so I had enough for each muffin. After printing, I cut out the flag sets, put Tombo Mono Adhesive on the back, and folded them in half over a toothpick. mmm piratey

In more exciting news, my Computrainer arrived today!! It’s a totally nerdy indoor bike trainer. I was a little disgruntled that the box was simply left on my doorstep by UPS, no signature required. I’m thankful that we live in a nice, quiet neighborhood. I would hate for someone to make off with that expensive box. O_O yikes. So I got the thing assembled, and I’ve done a little test riding. It seems that the heart rate monitor is a little finicky, so I’ll fiddle with that tomorrow. I need to read the manuals, so I’m 100% familiar with the system’s capabilities. I’ll report in tomorrow night with more details!

(crummy cell phone photo!)

On Tuesday I saw Chicago (the band!) with my mom and grandma. Sort of girls night out, I guess. We had a bite to eat and a few drinks before the concert, and had a lovely evening. Here’s a crappy video I took with my cell phone!

Mom brought over this special gift which she purchased for me at a yard sale for $30! It’s a fun retro Minolta XE-5 35mm camera! It came in this super heavy-duty metal case with lots of extra goodies. I got electronic flash, cleaning kit, polarizing filter, remote shutter release, and telephoto and wide-angle lenses, as well as the original manuals. I have some old film in the fridge just waiting to get loaded into this baby.