Dinnertime!

So the people I live with have been having a tough kind of few days. I decided to make dinner, and looked around the house for what we had. Thankfully, we had stuff from a Costco run recently, so I just asked for someone to please get me some mozzarella cheese, and boom it appeared.

So I thawed three of the very large chicken breasts we got from Costco (the house brand), then got out one of the larger pans. Put some sauce in the bottom, put the chicken in. Put some sauce on top, then sliced up some of the mozzarella cheese (not a lot, and not very thick), and put it on top. Then some more sauce on top of the mozzarella, and sprinkled it with basil and oregano, and baked for about 25 minutes. The cheese got soft, the chicken got done (you’d probably want to cook longer if you used the chicken frozen, but I think that might mess things up a bit), and it went over well. Served it over noodles, a little bread on the side.

There were leftovers (my housemates couldn’t finish the chicken breasts, which are very very large, to be honest), so they have food for tomorrow.

This is how I spent my evening, cooking. It’s terribly calming, in a way, when you have to consider what you’re doing and how to do it, and focus on it.

Tonight's outing.

Tonight, I headed to the Seattle Photoshop User Group Meetup where they were discussing Lightroom and things to do with it. We got some tutoring and discussion from Colin Smith, who runs Photoshop Cafe (as of this writing there’s some issue with it, and Google’s blocking it, but it’s a fine, solid place), which was pretty interesting.

There were some technical issues, and apparently some comprehension issues (people apparently not hearing each other very well on both sides), but it was a pretty solid night of tutorials and showing how things work, and how the Adobe ecosystem works as well.

So yeh, that was good.

The plans for this week…

Tuesday is the Lightroom panel at the Seattle Area Photoshop User Group meetup, which has the promise to be very interesting. (I’ve played with LR4 a little, and should get to know it better soon.)

This past weekend I watched the movie “Helvetica”, which some people might think would be terribly boring, but if you have an interest in these sorts of things is actually very interesting – looking into how the font developed and spread, along with interviews with fontmakers, graphic designers, and going into why there’s a number of designers who dislike Helvetica’s ubiquity, and why. Really, very interesting (at least for me). I need to watch the other films in the sort of trilogy, “Objectified” (about industrial design and designers) and “Urbanized” (about urban design, including architecture). The third isn’t quite my thing right now, but knowing about it might be pretty useful. (And all three are on Netflix, so that’s helpful!)

Thinking I should ramp up my drawing, too. Just because I still am pretty terrible at it, but there’s only one way to get better. I may just not have the eye for life drawing, but some other kind may suit me.

This week's plan:

Monday: , Patricia Ridenour – The Creative Process: Finding Your Own Approach. Probably going to head out early, take some pictures along the way, then use the Air to make a portfolio kind of thing. Just to make something that isn’t my colored linear.

Tuesday: the Adobe InDesign User’s Group (sorry, site’s not working, no link), where the discussion is about typography and fonts.

Next Tuesday is the Adobe Photoshop User’s Group, which is about Lightroom.

Networking, learning, trying. And still sending out at least 5 job apps a day.

The Tuesday after that is the Start Next Quarter seminar at Seattle Central Community College, where I hope to have a better chance of returning to school.

So. Plans.

(Some of this may be familiar to people, but I’m summarizing it all here, both to tell people and to remind myself.)

Investment in the future.

I decided to invest a bit in my future, which (if all goes well) involves computers and graphics. Here’s what I did:

First: joined the National Association for Photoshop Professionals. A lot of tutorials, a lot of information, a lot of contacts, and, due to when I joined, a free copy of [amazon_link id=”0321823745″ target=”_blank” ]The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers[/amazon_link].

Second: I received some gift cards from friends, so Amazon also brought me [amazon_link id=”0240525922″ target=”_blank” ]How to Cheat in Photoshop CS6[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”0321823761″ target=”_blank” ]The Hidden Power of Blend Modes in Adobe Photoshop[/amazon_link].

Third: use my subscription to lynda.com so I can get up to speed on some tools in Photoshop I don’t use much, but may end up doing so (the pen tool, man, I need to understand the pen tool).

Fourth: practice. practice, practice, practice.

Then practice some more.

Also… I just saw I made an HTML error. Not good… have to remember to proofread better.

First paragraph for a low-grade supervillain's story.

I’m going to just sometimes drop ideas in here, just for the whole idea of doing something a little creative. This is an idea for the guy in a super-hero comic who has no luck at all.

“All my life I’ve been a loser. Everything has been just the wrong way. And then, when I actually get superpowers… I gain the ability to transform my body into metal… do I get a cool metal, a great metal? I don’t get iron. I don’t get titanium. I don’t even get freaking magnesium. No. I get manganese. I get the only metal that’s really only useful with other things. I get the hench-metal.”

It's been a while.

I suppose I should apologize. But, you know, I won’t. I’ve just been kind of distracted by a number of things.

So I’ve been working on the following:

  • Working with Photoshop CS6 and InDesign CS6
  • Learning a number of Photoshop techniques for doing various things
  • Teaching myself to draw and paint
  • pestering the Internal Revenue Services for paperwork, to wit a tax transcript.

The last because, well, at this point in time I’m trying to apply to local colleges. Not much luck finding work so… time to go back to school. And the stuff above is all part of it. Because I’m hoping to get into the Seattle Central Community College program in Graphic Design.

Wish me luck.

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