My day: Nelson woke me at 8:30 or so by jumping on the bed and making noise. Of course I loved on him right away. Then before getting out of bed, I had looked at Facebook and donated to a fund-raiser for No Kill Lehigh Valley. There are too few good guys around, and the Lehigh Valley and NKLV lost one recently...
I read a story in today's Times and immediately imagined how Paul Harvey would have done it -- A medal ceremony for service in Cambodia... clearing land mines... there were an estimated five *million* mines laid during the civil strife in the Eighties and Nineties, and many, a great many, of them still in the ground... thousands of injuries, including some 25,000 requiring amputations, have been recorded recent years. But Magawa has worked diligently to help clear a million and a half square feet of land over the past four years, and for his service he was awarded a gold medal... And Magawa... is only five years old. A five-year-old -- African giant pouched rat.
These are good days. Pat and I are healthy, although she's having pain in her sacroiliac that her chiropractor is treating, but there's been no recurrence of cancer, or kidney stones, or vertigo, or high blood pressure. We also have enough money to get by, and on days off from work like today, we have time to get out and enjoy it, although not quite as much as if there were no pandemic.
Pat & I picked up a few things at Giant, enough to trigger the $10-off-$50 coupon received in the mail, and at home I first baked some pecan chocolate chip cookies, then a pizza for supper. Nestle was making what they called Artisan brand chips along with their Toll House morsels, and I liked them as much or more than the 60% cacao brand from Ghirardelli. But as soon as they came out, Ghirardelli dropped their prices, and whether it was that, or people not willing to switch, or a combination of things, the Nestle chips were discontinued at Giant, and then at Wal-Mart. So the good news was that I picked up several bags at a discount, but the bad news is that they're the last ones I'll be able to buy...
Still getting the downstairs laptop back to where it was before I re-installed Windows on the new SSD. After trying numerous programs for photo management, I've gone back to 2010's Windows Photo Gallery. It hasn't been supported for years, and isn't even on the Microsoft website for download anymore, but I couldn't find another program that helps prepare photos with the usual crop and touch-up prior to opening them in a full-featured editing program, while also letting me tag photos. FastStone, I'm learning, is very good at much of what I want, (tonight I learned how to use the drop shadow feature shown on the photo posted earlier today) but tagging is not available. More than once, someone from Tabby's Place has asked for a copy of one of my cat photos, so the tags are invaluable for making that search simple. Other programs had too much learning curve, not enough intuitive.
So it's back to Photo Gallery, the one I know, with its simple Control-T tagger. When Microsoft replaced it with Photos, they kept much of Photo Gallery's features, except that copies of the photo being edited could no longer be saved in lossless TIFF format. I had it down to a system; open up the original photo, use Crop on it and save a copy as a TIFF. Then open the TIFF and tinker with color and light as needed, and re-save that as another TIFF. Then open in GIMP for the heavy-duty Photoshopping, save that TIFF, re-size it to web dimensions and open that one in Paint.Net. Why one more tool? Because Paint.Net lets you see how large the file is going to be when you save it as a JPEG, while the other two programs don't.
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