Late night blog

We were away tonight…had dinner with friends across the river. The same people who host the annual sugar shack get-together in the spring. That seemed far away now…the snow lay thick around the sugar shack.

We had a very good supper and I’m feeling really stuffed. It started with a veggie soup, then we had beef stew with mashed potatoes. Then a salad, then cheese and finally two kinds of dessert and coffee. The order of dishes is a little different here from what I’m used to…the salad comes after the main course.

They live far out in the country-side across the St. Lawrence River so it’s quite the drive to get there. Not much traffic on the Transcanada Highway at this time of night so we had a smooth ride.

Yesterday we went downtown and did our grocery shopping. I also bought this..a little lambkin. Gerry says it looks like Dolly Parton LOL.

We shop for groceries in two different stores usually…the big Maxi supermarket and the local IGA store… and I have a whole bunch of those bags we use now instead of the plastic bags they have in the stores. It’s actually amazing how smooth that transition was — from plastic bags to these.

Anyway..I don’t use the IGA-bags in Maxi and the other way around.

When we came home from that shopping spree I had four bags that I unpacked in the kitchen. As I emptied them I threw them out on the floor in the big room…there were black bags from Maxi, one green bag from IGA and a «neutral» one from Hannaford’s in Maine.

McDuff was sneaking around as usual…didn’t pay much attention to him at the time…until I was picking up the bags!

He chose the green one! LOL

Picture Perfect — Illumination

Welcome to Picture Perfect

~ Each week a theme will be posted up on Thursday, and you are invited to put up your best picture with that theme in mind, it should be just

ONE and ORIGINAL,

i.e not off the internet,

Then come back and post a comment on this page ( http://fotofriday.multiply.com/journal/item/62/Picture_Perfect_Friday_Illumination_ )
so that everyone can link to your blog and see your pic.

By all means mention your camera and lens used, and if the picture has been altered or enhanced in anyway! Out of the box thinking is encouraged!!

Please open your page for viewing for all for that day…and then visit as many others as you can! Try and post a decent size pic on your blog page, so much is lost if the pic is too small or too big.

The entries will close at midnight on Friday

oOo

The theme this week will be

Illumination

and this is my egg shaped lamp.

Camera:	Nikon E950
Exposure:	0.007 sec (1/137)
Aperture:	f/8.9
Focal Length:	12 mm

Firefox…you got me!

It’s another snowy day even though it has ceased right now. We were meaning to go downtown today but decided against it. It’s no fun when it’s snowing like this. Yesterday was the same — on an off all the time!

Some time ago… I don’t even remember if it was here in the blog or in some group — we were writing about pet peeves. My pet peeve at the time was when people told me which browser to use. It just irked me to pieces…like I didn’t have a mind of my own, being able to choose browser.. totally oblivious to the ones that are around out there.

This made me an avid Internet Explorer user…out of spite. Of course I had Firefox installed so that I could view the page themes I made but IE was my default. I may sometimes be stubborn or hard headed but I do keep an open mind and after a discussion in a group here on Multiply I made an agreement with myself: To use Firefox for one week and then evaluate whether to set it as default or not. Well…now it is!

It was no big revelation about that..I was pretty familiar with it — I’ve had it before — it was just a hang-up I had. I can’t honestly say that it loads any noticeably faster as many people claim but it’s alright and it’s fun with the «skins» and all that. I’m easily amused. I have a few «add-ons» but I had them before (CSS Viewer, Web Developer and so on). At first I had some issues with how certain fonts were displayed but now I have everything adjusted to my liking.

Somewhere I read about an add-on called «IE-tab», but from what I understand it only works with Firefox 3 and that’s still in Beta. That will be handy…to just switch to another tab to see what it looks like in IE, when you’re working on a new theme, for example.

Last night was kind of lousy, TV-wise, so I took a photo of one of the Easter lilies and photoshopped it. The result of that is the picture above.

Ice Hotel, Quebec

Today we had planned to go to the usual shopping mall in St. Foy but that didn’t happen. At first we were just going to stay at home but the day was beautiful so we decided to do something after all…get out of the house. We’ll have snow overnight so tomorrow will probably not be as nice.

We have an ice hotel here in Quebec and it’s only approx. 25 minutes drive west of Quebec City.. going towards Montreal. It’s open until 1st of April so there was still time and we took off. Just recently we watched a program om T.V. about the construction of the Swedish ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi and it was extremely interesting to see how they did it.

To see it for real was certainly different. What an impressive work they put into this! The rest of all the photos I took is in my photo album here .

Test — Picasa

This is not a regular blog post.
Just wanted to see how Picasa (Google/Gmail photo albums) worked in here. Many people use Picasa as it is linked to their Google account. So far so good. You can see the snow situation today. I can’t seem to get rid of the blue border that indicates it’s a link though..normally I just type in border=0 in the code but it doesn’t work. I don’t know… In Picasa you don’t have unlimited storage so I don’t think it would be my first hand choice.

Good Friday

Well..Good Friday is almost over and it wasn’t much different than any other day.

We did some grocery shopping — everything was open as usual except the post office.

All the animals were still in the shopping center and I had hoped to get some better photos of the nice llama. He was still there but probably just fed up with the whole thing…which I can understand. He was lying down and hiding his head in the hay. It must be quite stressful for animals to spend a whole week in a shopping center, in a cage, with all the people wandering around..photo flashes..sounds… These guys in the photo seemed perky enough though — one of them kept crowing all the time.

When I was young…growing up in Sweden, Good Friday was a dull day. Everything was closed…and I mean everything!…so if you’d forgotten to buy something it just had to wait! Christmas Day was the only other day that was like that. I think I was in my 20’s when the first super market started to keep open on Good Friday. My Mum was upset…not because she was a very religious person but because it was against her traditions or something. If I ever complained as a teenager about Good Friday being dull, she always told me that SHE …. when SHE was young had to wear dark clothes and black bows in her hair! So there.. !

We always had fish on Good Friday and that is something that I actually have kept up all my life. Today we had fried sole and hollandaise sauce. It was good.

St. Patrick’s Day celebrated

I met this friendly llama in the shopping center today. A very proud looking animal who posed willingly for my camera.

Each week before Easter they bring a whole bunch of farm animals into this particular mall…goats, bunnies, chickens…you name it. This llama was a first, though…never saw that before.

When we were done with out shopping, and I with my photographing, we went out for lunch.

I had my usual Eggs Benedict — like I’ve said before — «Why change something that works?!» It was just as good as usual — in this place you also get a couple of pancakes with them and lots of ham.

The rest of this day I devoted to try and make my Multiply page look the same in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Now I’ve reach a point where I don’t think it’s going to get any better and I can live with the result. The only difference right now is a small space in between the navigation bar and the welcome message.

I won’t mess with it anymore now, risking to screw it up. Guess I’ll make some eggs in Photoshop instead…Easter will be upon us very early this year…already Good Friday this week!

The Ides of March

I’m not even sure of what the IDES of March ARE…only that someone was supposed to beware of it.. Something Shakespearean from Julius Caesar I believe. Either way it’s the 15th of March today so…I’ll beware.

Yesterday we had the roof shovelled. McDuff was a very attentive onlooker. He sat here on my desk looking out on all the snow falling — now there’s a huge pile outside the window. The fact that he could hear somebody walking on the roof also made him very excited. Good thing that it came off though.

The day before yesterday we went for a little spin to a shopping center we rarely go to and at the same time we went and had a look at the falls… Montmorency Falls, that is. Expected them to be frozen as usual but there was actually a great deal of water falling.

Mona’s Friday Dare

As many of you know by now, my friend Mona has this great idea…to pick some kind of theme and we all participate with photos of something in our home. This week:

«This Friday – until next! – I dare you to show me any kind of pattern that can be found in your home!»

I particularly liked this weeks pick… being the avid “photoshopper” that I am, I tend to look at patterns everywhere…at home..in stores…commercials on T.V. and so on.

Here are my patterns that I choose for this:

a placemat a red throw from Wal*Mart and a towel

a small rug gray matter

If you feel like doing this…go and post your link at Mona’s page http://monaswe2007.multiply.com/journal/item/98/I_dare_you…

Blogling

Today, while searching for some brushes for Photoshop, I came across this really neat storage site. There are so many of them so it really takes something extra to impress me. I have been using Photobucket ever since I started here in Multiply because it’s so handy how it copies the URL.

This place does that too but what got me a little excited about it was how you can choose which size of the picture in question you want.

This rose here above I’ve gone from the very smallest thumbnail to large thumbnail. There are larger formats too.

You can upload all kinds of files and share them. I will post this link in my Links section for reference but I wanted to write a little about it and show the different photo sizes.

Here it is:

http://www.mediafire.com/