Posts Tagged ‘ZenPhoto’
I don’t leave home very often, and I like it that way. I can’t remember the last time I stayed in a hotel, so being away from home in a strange place is weird to say the least. The hardest thing for me the first night away was staying in a hotel in a city, next to a highway with traffic so loud I barely got any sleep. I’m so spoiled from living in B.F.C., where we rarely hear a car go by so it makes it very difficult to fall asleep when there is lot of ambient noise. The hotel was kind enough to move me across the hall, to the side of the hotel that overlooks a golf course. At least I should be able to get some much needed sleep tonight. I miss my honey and all my kitty kids so much, and I’ve only been gone 36 hours. Only 156 to go. But since I’m in a place that has much better internet service I figured I’d take the opportunity to upload a bunch of pictures that have been stacking up in the queue. First up is more pics added to the Spring 2009 gallery, and I’m working on galleries for the rest of the kitty kids to get posted before I head back home. Being away is hard, but it also makes me grateful for being able to live where I do. It may be inconvenient sometimes, but it is so beautiful and peaceful and there isn’t anywhere else I’d rather be.
Short post today as I have another busy week ahead. The weather has been absolutely gorgeous with temperatures in the mid-seventies, which is perfect at our altitude because it feels ten degrees warmer than it actually is. We’ve been spending a lot of time outside getting this year’s projects underway. Everything is so green right now, and the wild flowers have started their annual display which makes it difficult to focus on the work at hand. The barn patio project is almost done, we just need to move a little more dirt before I can start laying the stones. Frequent work breaks are necessary during this beautiful weather, and here are a few photos I took while out on a walk the other day. I hope you enjoy them.
Pete’s been working on a patio for the barn and it’s just about done. There’s been a bit of a mud problem since we bought the place; the sloping around the building is not correct causing water to pool around the entry doors. He used some rail road ties that we got for free to create a base for the patio and borders for raising the area near the doors to divert the water. We bought pressure treated 2×10’s for the patio from a local lumber yard that’s going out of business and saved 30% off the regular price. The patio looks very nice, and Pete also built a bench next to the door with a shoe rack below. I’ve started on a low rock wall to extend the railroad tie border to the end of the area in between the parking spaces, and the plan is to make a fire pit and put a table and chairs in the section between the two big pine trees. I’m going to make a rock pathway in the space right in front of the barn, to keep down the amount of mud that gets tracked onto the patio, and next to that will be a small grassy area. The past few days it’s been raining off and on so I’ve not been able to make much progress on the rock work. Hopefully the rest of the week will be nice so we can get this project finished and start refurbishing the table and chairs that will go between the pine trees. When it’s all done the mud factor will be somewhat under control and we’ll have another place on the property to sit and enjoy the scenery.
We’ve been very busy the past week or so, which is why it’s been ten days since the last post. Pete’s been working on a patio down at the barn (I need to take some pictures of the project before it’s all done), the new Char Griller Outlaw smoker that I bought for him is finally all put together (more on that story in another post), I made a cover for the master bedroom window seat cushion (more on that in another post), and then I spent two days this week doing spring cleaning. While all this was going on the kitties have been loudly protesting the lack of attention, except for Squeak who’s been having fun with her new toy – an empty Pacifico twelve pack box. She is so damned cute, that Squeak in a box!
Our current kitchen is small and not suited to our culinary adventures, but until we can build our dream kitchen we have to make due. The biggest problem is the lack of cabinet and counter space, which was somewhat lessened when we brought the steel prep table home from the restaurant we used to own in town. It is three feet deep and four feet long, has a large drawer, and a bottom shelf where we store one of our sets of pots and pans and the deep fryer. The problem with this is that it is open, and we have four indoor cats. So basically whenever we want to use any of the items that are stored on that bottom shelf they have to be washed first. One day I got so tired of having to clean the fryer before we could use it that I decided to make a cover for it. I’m a novice sewer, at best, and am amazed that I made something like that without a pattern. I just looked at the fryer and could see in my head the shapes that I needed to make it work. The fryer cozy made Pete and I laugh because even though it is a useful item it is a bit ridiculous due to the leopard fabric it’s made of. But when you live in B.F.C. you’ve got to use what’s available when domestic silliness happens!
I first saw the cellphone beanbag chair last Christmas in one of the many catalogs that fill our mailbox during the holidays. They were super cute, and I thought they would be a good solution to our cellphone situation here in B.F.C. You see in order to get a signal strong enough to make a call our cellphones need to be propped up against a window in the front of the house, facing the nearest tower. Doing this will get up to four bars of reception, but if you pick up the phone or move it the signal is lost. (We had to sit on the planter wall and lean towards the window without moving in order to have a conversation before we got bluetooth headsets!) The problem was the phones occasionally fell over for one reason or another and as a result they had gotten a few scratches. The other issue was that the window frames we were leaning the phones on were interfering with the signal reception. I was going to buy the mini beanbags for us for Christmas last year but then I saw the price ($9.99 each plus shipping) and thought “I could make that!” Fast forward to yesterday, and voila! One custom leopard print cellphone beanbag chair! I got a free beanbag chair pattern online from Budget101.com that I used as a template to make a scaled down pattern. I used a piece of graph paper (printed from a free template I found at this website) and drew the three pattern shapes in the scale that I wanted, cut them out and proceeded to follow the instructions on the pattern page. The only thing different about the beanbag I made is that there is no zipper, I simply hand stitched the bottom closed after I filled the beanbag with dried chamomile flowers. Yep, mine is stuffed with chamomile flowers. I was going to stuff it with lavender flowers but unfortunately did not have enough. Since I live in B.F.C. I have to be adaptable and use what’s here, hence the chamomile flower stuffing. The total cost of my custom cellphone beanbag chair was about $2 and a few hours of my time. I am very satisfied with how it came out and would have to say that the cellphone beanbag sewing session was a success. I think I’m going to make a few more to give as gifts to the people I love. They are so cute, who wouldn’t want one?
Yesterday I spent 12 hours working on the site, specifically on the installation of photo gallery software called ZenPhoto. I have to say that experience was in no way zen, at one point the whole site had been wiped out and I was ready to give up on the entire project. But those who know me know that I am determined, a little stubborn even, and there was no way this virtual world was going to get one over on me. After taking a break I dove right back into the mess and figured out how to recover the blog, the website, and finally got the ZenPhoto installed and running! It seems to be a very good photo gallery package with lots of flexibility, and the dynamic gallery function is what really sold me on this particular handler. So there will be more changes to come, and the photos link will more than likely come and go over the next week or so while I continue to build the galleries and configure ZenPhoto to my liking.
