Thinking on Good Things, While My Computer Acts Up

I’m feeling much more my old fangirl self after the holidays, so it seems almost cruel that my laptop has decided to freak the heck out.  Forget about scrolling through Tumblr, there are hardly any images displayed, but little depressing icons where there should be lovely photos, fanart, gifs and so on of my favorite actors. And it’s all of my browsers, not just one, so I know it must be something up with the computer and not one of the programs. 😦

I’m in the process of backing up my files and then I’m going to try and use the reset in Windows 8. Gotta admit to a bit of trepidation on that score, but a girl’s gotta do whatever it takes to get her pretty pictures back! 😉 Fingers crossed this works.

While I’m sans images, I thought I’d share a story of great kindness that really touched my heart this week.

Where I went to grad school, several of my church friends work with an organization that goes out everyday and takes hot food, coffee, blankets and so on to homeless people in the area. That’s been especially important over the last several days with this extreme cold and they’ve been trying to get as many people out of the cold as possible by means of churches opening up their basements and fellowship halls, the single shelter in the area and even by putting people up in motels thanks to generously donated funds.

The shelter got a rather generous donation that they weren’t expecting and when I read about it, it reminded me of the goodness to be found in our fellow human beings. Check out the story here.

And now that I’m back in the land of decent internet connection, this also reminds me to share this along with everyone else who already has:

So here’s to kindness, generosity, good will and everything wonderful in this New Year…and hopefully a fully functioning computer too. 😉

Time Zone Pondering

One day until Mr. Armitage’s birthday!

All the various ways to celebrate we have going on in fan world:

There is still time to SpReAd the Love by donating a pint of blood or pound of food within your local community.

 

Don’t forget about Agzym’s birthday countdown. The bags are fabulous with Gisby’s cartoons!

I expect tomorrow to be filled with all kinds of fun stuff and goodies on the various blogs. After all, this is more or less a holiday for us Armitage admirers.

So now, about this time zone pondering…I’ve been trying to decide which time zone would be best for posting my special birthday post. Mr. A was born in England, so GMT would be a good choice. However based on his physical location on the globe (Detroit, MI) his birthday will start at midnight EST. Then of course, I could always just stick with my own time zone, CST. Hmmm, so many choices.

What do you think?

Stipple Richard

I’m back from visiting my brother’s family. My nephew is just as adorable as I expected, although the little guy decided the best way to welcome Aunt Jas was by peeing on me almost immediately. I chose to view this as his way of marking me as his favorite aunt! 😉 It was so much fun to see how much his sisters adore him, showering him with kisses and hugs. It melted my heart.

Now that I’m home, I’ve been catching up on reading my favorite blogs and thinking about what I want to do next. There are several posts I have in mind for here on the blog. I just have to make a list and get cracking.

1. I finally watched Between the Sheets, which probably deserves a reaction post.
2. There are several Photoshop tutorials I’m looking forward to trying out and sharing the results.
3. If I can manage to get past my writer’s block, chapter 6 of John and Maggie’s story needs to be completed.
4. Most importantly in the short term, there is a little something I’m working on for a special day that’s coming up later this month!

In the meantime I thought I’d share another of my Photoshop experiments. I wanted to try making a stippled drawing in Photoshop. At first, the plan was to do it all manually with a brush, but I came across a tutorial that looked interesting, so I gave it a try. You all know how much I love tutorials! 🙂

Here is the original image I started out with:

 

And here is the result of my Photoshop experiment:

 

It isn’t quite what I was going for, but still a fun effect.

I’m off either this afternoon or tomorrow to donate food for SpReAd the Love. Have you donated your pint of blood or pound of food yet? There are still 13 days left to donate!