June 28, 2012

I am a reptile and I live in a cave.

It's 102° outside and I haven't turned on the ac on since last night. I experimented last summer with "charging" the house. Meaning, I put the ac on for about 2 hours before bed. The secret is getting the house down to 73° at the beginning of the summer and then never opening the windows or the shades for the remainder of the summer.
I don't think the thermostat is spot on, but it tells me it's around 72 -75 degrees. I watched a vid about installing a programable thermostat. It looks easy enough except for the part where I'm to crawl in my basement and turn off the switch at the boiler plate. I need to do a meet and greet with my basement one day. I have been in it once with a chaperone. It's right up there with putting a sump pump in the bottom of the pool to drain water. Somehow dangling an electrical device in a body of water seems oh I dunno, wrong, but it's also on the list of home maintenance this summer.

I'm building a new website right now. It's going slow since I lost a bunch of software capabilities (Photoshop and Aperture for starters) when I upgraded to Lion. All I needed was the skew and resize feature, but for $79 the panty-waist version of Photoshop does not do this. For a mere $700 I can have the skew function which helps when I missed out on squaring up the art in the camera in real life. I'm holding out. Technology is holding me back right now.

My recent run of shows is winding down. The solo show at the Customs House Museum received a nice review.

 I have a couple of studio visits coming up. Summer is going by fast.

I'm into trail running a couple of days a week. 5 miles today. Woot. Followed by Gatorade and a pecan pie tart. Double woot.

The guys at the hardware store were really excited to get this back into working order:


Turbo, baby. I could probably chop vegetables with those blades. 



5 comments:

Mery Lynn said...

I was telling folks here in Rome that the heat reminded me of LA - the humidity is so low. Somehow that thought makes it easier to survive.

Tibi said...

Have you tried Gimp (http://www.gimp.org)? It's free and I use it all the time to skew/resize/color adjust photos of my artwork. It's really reliable and quite powerful.

Anonymous said...

Hey Tibi,
Yes, I did try it. I will give it another shot. It was almost exactly what I needed, but apparently my image was just a wee bit out of their parameters. I also had never heard of it, so I was a little worried about it being buggy and I trashed it. Thanks for recommending it. I'll install it again. - mah

Carla said...

I have a super old version of Photoshop Elements (which I assume is what you're calling painty-waist). I can skew - click on "image" then "transform" from the drop down menu, then skew. Maybe you have some other painty-waist version of Photoshop though. Elements actually does a lot and I beieve is less than $100? Mine came free with a scanner from about 10 years ago.

M.A.H. said...

It was &79 but I did not buy it. I had the full adobe suite for the last 15 years. I called adobe tech support and he told me over the phone specifically that the current photoshop elements did NOT have that capability. I told him exactly what I needed and that it was the only reason I would be purchasing Elements. He made it seem like it was just basic for fixing red-eye and enhancing some contrast etc. I even said how lame it was that I would have to pay $700 for the full version just for transforming skew and perspective and he tried to sell me a "subscription" for X amount of dollars and I'm like "so I would be renting photoshop?" I will call again and see if someone else tells me differently, or ask the peanut gallery on FB if someone has the current version of adobe for Lion. It's the whole Mac upgrade thing. I love Apple, but sometimes, they frustrate me. On a side note, I knew more than the guy at the genius bar on my last visit to the Mac store and he was like, "you should be working here." I am not super tech genius, but I guess I know more than I thought.


(I lost Aperture, which is also $79 and had different capabilities, but iPhoto was under $15 and at least iPhoto lets me batch resize everything. I can scan through Preview. My office software computing infrastructure is so McGuyver right now.)

It's over.

Nov 7, 2020. Tears of joy and relief. It's been unreal and I'm ready to get back to a sense of normalcy. The desert has been tough.