holiday wallpaper #2

[Click to enlarge. I hope it fits most screens with one option or another...]

Holiday wallpaper #2. Feel free to use it if you like it. Photography & graphics by me.

Feedburner.

I've finally signed up for Feedburner and now all of you lovely loyal readers can sign up to be emailed when I've posted! No more checking my blog 24/7 only to be disappointed in my lack of creative and interesting posts! Just type your email in over there on the left, push submit and presto! you're signed up.

***note***

When you subscribe, Feedburner will take you to this very ugly, very untrustworthy looking page with pixelated letters and numbers that you will have to type in a box for robot scans - I just wanted you to know that I'm not trying to sell your emails to unpleasant cyber organizations, Feedburner just hasn't hired a design team yet. All in good time, I suppose... XD

star trek: the next obsession

Hello, Bonjour, Ciao, Hallo, 'Ello, *waves*

I would like to dedicate this post to Christina, because she has been so absolutely lovely as to lend us her seasons of Star Trek: the Next Generation. Star Trek was huge in my family when I was a babe, Mother apparently bribed my brothers with Star Trek reruns - but alas, I was too young to actually appreciate it. I just remember being excited when the "Picard and Data" show came on, because, as far as my silly memory can remember, Star Trek: The Voyager was more likely to air than TNG.



So, thank you very much, Christina, for letting us borrow the show! We - or, at least, I - am enjoying them very much. Data is, and I suspect he forever will be, my favorite character. I adoooore him and his pasty eyebrows. The things that they thought were acceptably believable back in the day... it's hilarious. I can't think of a single reason that Data can't have regular eyebrows. He has regular hair! :D

For those sad, Data-deficient readers who don't know who the heck Data is besides a pasty, pallid man with funny sideburns who is alternately dressed as Sherlock Holmes and a Starfleet officer... Data is an android (human robot), the only one of his kind. He is extremely intelligent and is constantly learning. More than anything, he wants to be human, and so he tries to learn and act as human as possible, but convinced that he is unable to feel emotion, he falls short a great deal of the time. Anyway, he's fantastic.
















<3 Data and <3 Christina. :)

the sniffles

Hi there!

Yesterday I rearranged my room. Again. To work with I have a desk, a bed, a couch, a trunk, a dresser, and a chair with a printer on it. In a very small space. So far I've arranged it in several different ways, but this one is brand spankin' new. Anyway... Thought I'd share that with you.


[ this is a bottle on a wire. it's orange and it has a little plaque on the wire that says "creativity." thought it was a cool way to edit it... ]

I'm also sick... Always seem to get a cold/sore throat in early to mid December. I usually can evade the silly illness all year long, until *kerplunk* December comes around.



I have made one of my two holiday wallpapers, though... See what you think...


[ obviously, click to eeeeenlarge.]

This is one of my all-time favorite songs, it's so hilarious. You're all welcome to use it if you feel compelled. :)

Oh, yeah, and I drew everything *but* the Dr. Seuss font/song title in Photoshop with my lovely Wacom pen tablet.



*sniffle/cough/sniffle*

I think I'm going to go watch Robin Hood. It's been pretty good so far, we've watched a few episodes of the first season, and now we've started the second season, because it seems more interesting. :)

play

Today Quinn and I made an excursion into Legoland. Quinn made a "junk," with super cool brown paper sails which he painted on, and a dragon figurehead.



I made a village inn, where Dumbledore is served ale by a pretty barkeeper girl, pirates often visit, and the beds upstairs often dump you on the floor. My creation was made solely using Harry Potter Legos. (save the tavern girl and the pirates.)



Coming soon: two Christmas wallpapers and a Christmas video! Just for you!

peace out,
caroline

thank you thank you thank you!

As I said in my title, like a generic plastic shopping bag: Thank you, thank you, thank you! For your comments. They made me ever so happy!

So, what has been going on?

- My aunt & co. came down for Thanksgiving. Yay!
- It rained for two days straight. Yay!
- We are almost finished with season one of Pushing Daisies. *sad*
- I'm almost done with Jamie's pretty scarf. Yay!
- I helped shoot a wedding with one of Sara's photographer friends. Yay!
- I got to keep Sara's camera at my house, with all of her super awesome lenses, or at least the one super awesome lens. Yay!
- And, of course, Thanksgiving. I've had a super lovely Thanksgiving holiday. Our multi-mixy families got together for our third annual Thanksgiving - only this time there were so many of us that we had to graduate to a space larger than the Green Bean. So, we set up at the Pres. church!
- And I made a video of the big par-tay.

Enjoy!

I'll be posting a video of our Christmas decoration efforts soon. :) Now I'm off to either watch the adorable first season of Pushing Daisies (officially the cutest show since infinity) or season two of Star Trek, Next Generation.

hello, again

Hi there!

Since my demographic (that is what Quinn would say) is starting to get onto me about lack of blog activity, I'm posting a post.

Ladies and gentlemen, children and monsters! I am honored to announce the reinstatement of my own movie review blog! Yay...

See, it even got revamped, with gorgeous colors (in my humble opinion) and a brand new header! For some reason, I never made a header for my movie blog. Just like photographers never take pictures of themselves and cooks don't make themselves dinner. Or that's how it seems to go, anyway.

Why, you may ask, did I decide to start reviewing again? Did Roger Ebert inspire me, with his lovely square face? No, though I do like his reviews. It was the fact that Mother and I have found a new mini series to obsess over! Oo yay! And a new lovely British actor.

I simply had to review it, and so, here we go! Let's hope that I can keep it up, for your amusement. But here's the deal, peeps. I want some commenting going on. If you comment on my posts, I'll post more posts, because I like posting, but sometimes it seems boring to post posts, but if you post comments on my post I'll post more posts. Savvy? Sweet.

Lots of love and general affection,
- your devoted authoress

project: griffin's camera // day 2

For the second day of my fun with Griffin's camera, we happened to go to Tallulah Gorge - which is absolutely gorgeous (haha) in the autumn. Here are the pictures!

Before we went to the gorge, we went to a little roadside outlook with a cute shop. I liked this scale. It was anciennnnnt. But why is there a mirror? Hmm, while I'm weighing my fortune, let's see how my jeans look today...





Then we had lunch...


It did consist of more than Organic Blue Sky Ginger Ale. But it is the best ginger ale around...









For those of you that haven't visited the gorge before, there is this really amazing walk down the mountain. It's a very long staircase that just winds down the side of the mountain, leading to a suspension bridge, which spans gorge. If you can read that itsy bitsy picture, you'll see that there is 620 steps to the bridge, but 1062 altogether, if you go over the bridge and down to Hurricane Falls. Going *down* the steps is as easy as pie (whatever that means... just makes me think of Pushing Daisies), but going back up is...



This gorge is famous for a crazy tightrope walker who walked across the gorge. One sign said that he did two headstands during his walk. That's some serious business.



We used to go to the gorge every Wednesday when we lived closer. We got so good at walking the steps that we wouldn't even break a sweat going up!





Only several hundred feet of open air under my feet, which are standing on 2x4 slats, nailed to three different beams and held up by hundreds of feet worth of suspension cable. The bridge shakes when you walk across it.

So, we had a great time! We could barely make it up the stairs again...

project: griffin's camera // day 1

Aren't the colors just...awesome? I wondered how I could capture fall in a more original way; the colors weren't a gorgeous when sharply in focus. But I absolutely love this array of lovely colors. One day I'm going to try to paint something like that.

Although I've been brought up around cameras, the only camera that I've been comfortable using is Mom's Fuji Finepix 6mp point-and-shoot. I've used Sara's cameras a lot, but not consistently enough to grasp a smooth operation skill. So, my very lovely brother, Griffin, offered to let me borrow his Canon Rebel XT (thanks so muchhhh). Today I decided to experiment with it and see what wonders I could create with an 18-55 mm, 3.5-5.6 lens, a wide-angle attachment, and a macro filter.

Here is the excessive collection of what I came up with. ^.^


This was really fun. When we realized that the macro and wide-angle attachments could come apart (they were meant to be used as one attachment), we were just using our eyes to look around and found that this created a fun picture. Like a magnifying glass (which is what a macro filter is), the macro attachment makes people turn upside down if you stand far enough away. So in this pic, I'm holding the macro, he's holding the wide-angle. :)


Vice versa. I did find it entertaining that it looks as though his thumb morphs into a second hand.


Pretty sunspots.


Somehow, dandelion puffs never bore me.


A wishie maker!


This is Little Chick. She's an odd duck. Chicken. Thing.




Isn't that pretty?

earl baldwin

I was looking through my first blog posts, and when I got to this post, I cracked myself up. That tobacco is pretty funny.

Then I noticed something. See how it says "made famous by the first Earl Baldwin."

Hmmm... The "first" Earl Baldwin.

Just think... there was more than one Earl Baldwin.

Sad situation. (as Sara always says.)

Good night!
-caroline

p.s. earl baldwin sounds like a name that a morbid nursery rhyme should be made for.

jiminy crispies!

A parcel of absolutely loveliness arrived in the post, via a burly brown UPS truck.

Want to guess what it ... *voices rises to a squeak* ... was!??

Adobe Design Suite CS Flippin' 4!







*gaspchokedie*

I started using Photoshop by the equal influences of my sister, Sara, and my online RPG addiction. She learned how to use it in her photography classes in college and when we would help her in her studio a few years later (2003, I think), she taught me how to do some simple things. I honestly can't remember, but I don't think I was terribly enthusiastic at the time. I think we were using Photoshop 5 or so then.

At the same time, I was doing Harry Potter roleplaying online, writing like a crazy girl. On those forums, they always have all of these generic avatars and signatures, that they just pass around and find free on sites. However, when I switched my roleplaying site, the new site, MH, had a quantity of Photoshop users, who would make custom signatures with models that represented our characters. It was so fun to personalize each character that one day I sat down on Sara's horrible, large, chunky black PC and conjured up my very own signature, using Ashlee Simpson as my model.



There it is. I just logged into my ridiculously old Photobucket account and found it.

I personally think that it was a good try for my first creation. I guess it was an omen of sorts. After that, I used Photoshop all the time. I downloaded it our family PC and trucked away at it, from . Five years later I can use Photoshop, as well as Illustrator, have made graphics for a band, Chamber of Commerce, realty, a small newspaper, an ad booklet, the Green Bean Coffee Cafe, three different websites for the Green Bean, a website for KC Elrod Photography, and of course, graphics, photography and photo editing for Sara Wise Photography, in which I am a company partner (of sorts). I went from the really old, beige, whirring PC, to a pretty white iMac named Johnny, to my new iMac, the silver & black beauty named Ernie. I've had Photoshop 7, CS, CS2 and now...

CS4.

And that is my story. Kind of like a rags-to-riches thing. Lol, it's so epic written down.

Say goodbye to the crappy, old, slightly not-so-legitimate Creative Suite 2... *waves*



Btw, want to know something really awesome?

I got that whole suite, which consists of about 9 different programs (which I intend to learn and use to their greatest potential), for $600. "What?!" I hear you say, "I thought Photoshop cost thousands!" Well, you're kind of right. I was eligible for the educational discount from Academic Superstore.

Buying it straight from Adobe, with no discounts, just Photoshop is $699. The whole Design Suite is $1799. I saved eleven hundred dollars.

So, anyways, isn't that awesome...

peace out,
caroline

p.s. i promise i'm not bragging, peeps. ;-]

the shiiiindig

We had a super fun, albeit windy, fall party/birthday party for Christina on Saturday. I made a video, so I don't think I need to say much more than: Happy Birthday, Christina! Thank you, everyone who came. :)

oatmeal cinnamon-raisin scones

Oatmeal cinnamon-raisin scones are... *quickly searches handy thesaurus* ... scrumptious, mouthwatering, delectable. Yum. Another Baking Illustrated recipe.

1 & 1/2 cup old fashioned rolled oats, or instant oats
1/4 whole milk
1/4 heavy cream
1 egg
1 & 1/2 cup unbleached, low-protein flour, like Gold Medal (not King Arthur. If you use King Arthur, make sure to add a tbsp or two more milk)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
10 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup raisins

I didn't have whole milk or heavy cream, so I just used 1/2 cup half and half, which seemed to work just as beautifully. Also, if you don't have unsalted butter (is an advocate of salted butter!), you can use salted, just remember not to put the extra salt in.




Spread the oats onto a cookie sheet.


And toast in the oven at 375, until lightly browned and fragrant. Let cool. Prepare a baking sheet. It says to use parchment paper, so if you have some, go for it. I had no problem with a naked pan.

Turn up the oven to 450.


Mix together cream, milk and egg in a medium sized mixing bowl. Set aside 1 tbsp for glaze.






Put flour, baking powder, cinnamon, sugar and salt in a food processor, fitted with a blade. Pulse until mixed, about 4 or so one-second pulses. Chop up the butter into small pats and dump on top of the flour mixture, then pulse about 14 one-second pulses, or until its the consistency of rough cornmeal. Mm.

Pour into separate, large mixing bowl. Add oats and raisins, keeping 2 tbsp of oats behind for use in dusting workspace. Pour in liquid mixture and fold together with a spatula until it forms these lovely mashy clumps. Then, the fun part... make sure your hands are clean, then dig into it yourself. I love squishing food with my hands: ground beef, mashed potatoes, frosting, if it's mushy I like to mush it. Anyway, back to the recipe. Knead it in the bowl, until it's in one cohesive mass.



Then, if you have one, use a 9 inch round cake pan. Sprinkle the bottom of the pan with half of your set aside oats, plop the ball in the middle, and squash it evenly into the pan, until it is flat. Then sprinkle the top with the other half of the oats, pat them, and move on with life. You can use a dough scraper or a brownie cutter or a chef's knife to cut the pie-like dough into eight parts. Taking the parts out may be kind of tricky, depending on the consistency of your dough. If they take a bit of smushing to come out, just reshape them.

Place them on your prepared baking sheet, 2 inch apart. Get out your 1 tbsp of cream/egg mixture and brush it onto each wedge, then top with 1 tbsp of sugar. By that I mean, start with 1 tbsp and use it for all of the scones, not a tbsp each. Which might seem obvious to you, but I found myself wondering what the book meant. o.o

Stick them in the oven for 12-14 minutes. They will look DELICIOUS and make you begin to hyperventilate, from the mouthwatering aroma of autumn cinnamon, and wholesome, hearty oats... but don't burn your face off trying to take a whiff from the oven, like someone silly. Not me. I wouldn't do anything so silly.


Wash dishes while you're waiting. It's a clever time-passing trick. Take pictures of your faucet, it really boosts your dish-washing energy levels.


This is how mine looked. *drools*



They were perfect. Fluffy, but dense, oaty, cinnamony, raisiny, and the glaze was delicious on top.

I strongly advise you to make them. Bake them. Eat them. Have some tea or milk or coffee. You'll feel like life is even more worth living. Honest. But you really should eat them outside, on a table in the yard, with a table cloth and a little vase of flowers, and your bestest friends or family with you. On your best china. That is what you should really do.


p.s. i wrote these instructions down by memory. do not come after me for vengeance if it goes wrong somehow, because i forgot to mention that the main ingredient is a cup of shrimp w/ heads. :D