November 2009 Archives

On occasion I allow Dusty to drink water out of my mug. This of course spoils him into thinking he can do it whenever he wants, which is not the case. I’ve almost gotten him to the point where he knows when he’s allowed to drink out of my mug (when I’m offering) and when he’s not (when I don’t have water in it). I had poured the rest of my water into their bowl before we left for Honey’s birthday dinner. When we got back, I sat down and Dusty started messing with the mug. He kept trying to put his face in it and didn’t succeed at first. So I told him to stick his head in the mug and he did. I was so shocked i had to take a photo. Then to see if he understood, I told him to do it again and he did. How hilarious is that? Enjoy!

So the little lady and I got all prettied up for thanksgiving dinner with the family. It’s always fun for us to dress up and go all out when there’s a family function. With my family if you didn’t dress up for easter then there must be something wrong. Although, I do wear jeans. Nice jeans, but jeans nonetheless. Here with Honey’s family it’s not important to dress up but the Little Lady and I like to do so (and I don’t get to do so very often) so we go all out! We are also wearing necklaces that I bought from a friend’s jewelry party ages ago. They are still in amazing condition and I love them still.

Little Lady was also kind enough to take a photo of me after I put my makeup on and made myself prettified. I can’t seem to take decent photos of myself lately so I let her do it. She does an amazing job and may go into photography and art classes next year. I’m hoping she does, it sounds like a lot of fun and I wish I had done that when I was in JVS instead of secretarial training. I’m sure it would have been a lot more interesting than being a receptionist. Hope everyone had a happy and safe holiday yesterday and that you’re still happy and content today. Laters.

Yes, I said ‘ho ho’ as in those chocolate cake rolls with cream on them and a chocolate coating outside. I learned how to make this dessert from a coworker but have taken a different route with it. She would crush the ho hos and stir everything together. It was good, REAL good. I like my way, too and other ideas that I’ve had this evening regarding it. I don’t like pie (it’s true, I don’t and yes I’ve taken a lot of shit for it over the years and sometimes I provide my own dessert when it comes to pie-based holidays.)

This is stage one. You need 1 box of Jello Chocolate Pudding. Mix it up per directions and stick it in the fridge. Then layer it on the bottom of your container. To slice the hohos so they don’t fall apart I used a chef’s knife. I would lightly draw the knife back and forth in the center of the ho ho and when it broke through the coating I’d push down. Then repeat that to get four slices. Layer them neatly.

This is a layer of regular cool whip. I bought the cheap store brand, if that really makes a difference to you. I layered it on pretty thick. I bought a small container of it and used 3/4 of the container. Anymore than that and I wouldn’t have had much room left in the bowl and I didn’t want to go far over the edge or anything. Now it’s time to get decorative.

Here you can see that I did another layer of ho ho’s but I left a gap. There’s no reason as to why other than to make it pretty. In the center are 4 ends. I had a 5th end that I had no room for and decided to let the Little Lady eat it before she started drooling over the dessert as I made it.

As you can see the final stage is to put a dollop of cool whip on the center and then drizzle chocolate syrup on top. I am sure there are other syrup flavors that would be good here as well, such as caramel. Another idea I had while showing the photos to a friend was to have sliced strawberries in between the center and the outer ring of ho ho slices. I was also asked about the calories regarding this dessert. Being as it’s a holiday they don’t count. You could also use other berries, cherries, blueberries or raspberries would be good as well. You just have to like chocolate with them. Enjoy for all the non-pie lovers out there!

For ages I couldn’t get my tablet working properly. There’s been a short in the wire for some time now. Not sure why, it hasn’t been mistreated and it certainly hasn’t been overused and abused. So finally I sat down and decided to figure out exactly where the short is located and what to do in order to fix it. As you can see in the photo above, the short is very close to the usb plug. That’s why no matter how I situated the cord it wouldn’t connect and work. You’ll also notice that I used a piece of yarn to tie it that way so it doesn’t move.

So far it has been working properly for over a week, which means I have a real mouse again and, if it works, I can start practicing with the pen tool again and figure out how exactly it works. That makes me happy. I paid 85 bucks and change for a small tablet years ago and I felt that I hadn’t gotten my full use out of it, since I rarely used it. Now it’s attached to the laptop, working, and that makes me happy. Laters.

So yesterday the three of us went to the Academy of Museum Sciences in San Francisco! We had a great amount of fun and I think anyone who comes within 200 miles of it should go see it. They have a new dome for the planetarium, a rain forest (we didn’t go to see it though), and a huge aquarium.

You can view the photos I took using the slide show: or if you want to click through them you can view them here at my Picasa account:

Academy of Sciences Museum

Either way, enjoy the photos! I enjoyed the trip. It was definitely worth the drive up there and back!

So not only do we have this fabulous new layout but this photo above was taken on halloween because it was a full moon. This is probably the best moon photo that I have ever taken. Probably because I balanced the camera on the trampoline and then cut it out of the photo. The other photos I took after two in this way turned out badly, even though I had the camera balanced as well. I probably shivered or something while the photo was being taken.

The new layout features a female assassin (usually called Rogues in other games) from GuildWars. The wallpapers I saw featuring her were pretty neat and intense but I wanted to make my own altogether, so I found an image of her, cut her out using the extract feature, fixed her up using the history brush and went to town on creating the layout itself.

By the way, I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but one of my favorite colors happens to be purple. I have always loved purple and black together and this layout simply makes my day. Enjoy!

So there were some issues which may have gone unnoticed since I don’t have billions of readers loading my site constantly. I made some changes to my Adify settings and added another skyscraper (I think I’ve made a whole 21 cents, btw) and it completely skewed the right-hand sidebar.

I didn’t know if it was an issue with css or an issue with a widget. Turns out the Social Widget needed some closing tags and after taking care of those everything is working out perfectly again.

I’ve also added more entries to the main page. I know more and more bloggers are going for ‘less is more’ and they have less entries (like some places I go have a lousy 2 entries on their page) and I personally find it annoying. If I haven’t been to a blog for a week I want everything right there on the front page and if they’ve blogged twice a day or more for the week I haven’t read then that’s my fault. But when you have 2 lousy entries on your home page, give me a break. I won’t bother clicking on ‘older entries’ either. I may be a fan but I’m not obsessed.

Anyway, the issue is resolved and even though I said they were resolved by FractiousKitty that’s really just Dusty in the greenhouse planter yawning at me from awhile ago. I thought it might help keep the right sidebar where it’s supposed to be with his oh so vicious look. Enjoy!

I took this photo in the early evening using the gate at the end of the driveway to balance the camera. I cut out the driveway and the powerlines, then with a little editing (a duplicate layer put as overlay) it turns into this. Enjoy.

Oh I got up and fed the Little Lady to the bus around 6:45 am like I do every weekday morning accept Wednesday (that’s when I have to take her to school due to the weird schedule and use the ejecto-seat). Then because I was freezing my cute tushie off I went straight back to bed and climbed in under my pillow and pile of blankets. Yes, I am strange. I have 2 king size pillows and I sleep under one to hold in the body heat that I can’t keep inside myself. It works to my advantage.

I got up somewhere around 10 or so and took a hot steamy shower. So hot that I had to open the curtain partially to let some of it out or suffocate. Then I wrapped my hair in a towel got dressed and made coffee. While my coffee was happily dripping away I took out the trash and started in the kitchen. I needed to do the fridge. Something awhile back had leaked from the top shelf all the way down and pooled under the left drawer. It had to get taken care of. Most of the stuff in the fridge went directly into the trash and hot steamy bleach water took care of the mess along with help from some watered down 409. So my fridge is now so clean you could eat off of the shelves and out of the drawers. Please don’t though, it took me forever to clean it.

There’s still a bunch more to do but it’s time for me to take a break and surf the web for a bit. I also want to put some more stuff up over at SEO Designs. Laters!

So I finally got SEO Designs up and running. Oh wait.. you’ll want a link to that right? SEO Designs. This is where I’ll be portraying old layouts used for Disillusioned and other blogs, old splash pages and the details that I can remember about making them.

This won’t impede anything shown here on Disillusioned because I’ll still upload graphics made from tutorials and photos, etc here. There’s also a new splash page in town, check it out: Sweetly-Evil.Org.

Nothing else going on right now other than getting the design for the design site working. Man that was a pain in the arse! I’m still having issues with the right menu, which is currently not showing since I am having problems with it. I use the same type of layout over and over again yet there is always an issue of some form that requires me to deviate for some reason. Yet I never find out why or what change it is that I make that all of a sudden makes it work because when I go to look at the other layouts everything is the same except some placement values and I know it isn’t that.

Anyway, enjoy!

Now that I have access to my precious Photoshop again and have downloaded quite a few fonts and some brushes to start that collection over, I decided to create something. I didn’t know what to do and was sort of bored and decided to look at all my fonts. After deleting the pixel-style fonts that are created after old receipt-style type or something like that I started playing around and this is what I came up with. Enjoy!

The most traumatic thing happened to me the other day when I opened Photoshop and it refused to open photos or images of any kind, even teeny tiny ones. It wouldn’t even create a new image. The program completely and utterly stopped responding to the point that it had officially died in my opinion. So I tried doing a repair. Didn’t work. I tried doing an uninstall/reinstall. Didn’t work. On the verge of tears I decided that the only thing I could do was the ultimate sacrifice ever.

Now let me remind you that this laptop was bought back when Vista was brand new and shiny and hellaciously spurned by everyone when they found out how buggy it was and that there were no drivers included in this bloated concoction of an operating system. This laptop was purchased when the wonderful and all-powerful Microsoft said ‘you will sell vista only or you will have no OS’ to everyone, basically screwing all of us to damnation. Just for that they made a special hell for them, I am told that there’s only vista available with no fixes, drivers or updates. Mwahahaha! Take that you bastards!

So anyway, on to the horror and trauma that I have had to endure during the reset. It was actually really freaking easy. Once I did a google and found out how exactly to cause the laptop to allow me to do the restore I didn’t have to do more than follow the prompts. It was eerily easy.

Then came the downloading of the updates. As vista update was downloading somewhere around 72 updates the first time around I was busy installing the installers that originally came with the laptop. This included Roxio software, AOL software and several other installers that there was no need to have on the computer being as no one ever used them.

Then it started installing the updates it had downloaded. The entire process from restore to factory settings to finishing the installation of updates took around 8 to 10 hours (give or take) and was almost painless. Once all the ‘shut down to install’ and ‘restart because you installed such and such’ was over I went to bed. I had also installed Live, Yahoo and Aim messengers and Avast virus scanning software somewhere during this time.

Since early this morning I have reinstalled Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash CS3 and they are all working beautifully. I have also reinstalled Microsoft Office 7 and a few other things that were needed. I’ve already began to collect fonts and brushes as well, being as I forgot to move them to a disc (oops) and that’s always fun to do, depending. Brushes for Adobe are easy to unzip and cut, then paste into their folder. The fonts I found are easier when you highlight them all, right click and choose Install All from the menu. That is the easiest time I’ve ever had installing fonts on Vista!

I’ve also made some major changes as well to the system properties. I turned off desktop composition completely instead of just for certain programs. No more flippy-floppy screen for me! I also turned off the elusive mouse shadow that I have never seen, menu sliding, shadows and more. The laptop is running better than it has in a very long time. I also plan to do a disk cleanup and defragmentation when I go to bed tonight. Yes, after reformatting the hard drive, installing vista and all these updates and programs, you should definitely defrag. Even when you buy a new computer, the first thing should be defragging it! I swear they do not do it before shipping it out. (And if you work for Dell or Compaq/HP or any other computer building company and you DO defrag before shipping out a system, please feel free to speak up!)

So I am back and I am still working on installing stuff in between doing little things to make it ‘mine’ once again, or at least my login anyway. I’m sure Honey will want access back as well once I get settled in. Laters!

Oh I’ve been a little bored lately and have been filling that time with Evony and creating graphics for a friend’s website and once in awhile Dungeons and Dragons Online. Yeah yeah, don’t bother going there. I am posting to show my latest creation, aka photo manipulation, of the Little Lady.

I found this tutorial over at PhotoshopLady.Com and it’s under Photo Effect, title is Evil Look, or something in that regards.

Little Lady has stated that she does not look evil in the photo. Well, whatever. Mine is also a bit different since I extracted her from the background and she has all those squiglie/swirly jagged edges around her. That’s taint! I tell you it’s the evil just oozing off of her! The background image is a beach in Australia. Don’t ask me where or why.

Click photo to enlarge, as always.

Laters!