Page 56 Redone and My Lens Arrived from Ukraine
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That’s supposed to be a wet kitten.
I bought a lens for my Leica on EBay. The seller is in Ukraine. I’m amazed that the lens could be delivered even though Ukraine is being horrifically attacked.
Sunday, June 26, 2022: A Hot Day in Southern Oregon
/We’re having one of our rare 100+ degrees days. Nacho the Pug is having a hard time dealing with it. My solution is to wet him down thoroughly. I’ll take him for a very short walk this evening.
The picture is a section from a TRI-X negative. What I love about it is the grain. This is a straight scan, with no processing.
Geting my Mac set up is driving me nuts
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Going nuts because of macOS Monterey
Switching from Windows to macOS is driving me nuts. Programs that are supposed to “just work” are not working. Emacs, which I rely on for technical writing (nothing to do with my art projects) is giving me a depressingly bad time. To regain my sanity, I decided to install VirtualBox and run Emacs in Linux…but Monterey doesn’t support VirtualBox in a simple way. It took 2 hours of hacking to get it working. Monterey is so paranoid it’s putting me into a bad mood.
On the other hand, while my eye (the right one) is healing, I need a temporary pair of glasses with a special prescription. Unfortunately, simple dollar store reading glasses won’t work. I eventually decided to buy some prescription glasses online from Zenni.
May 15, Also a chore day
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The diners, Willy and Nacho, admiring the chef’s Michelin star technique
Lots of chores this week. Because I’m having eye surgery tomorrow (Monday), I have to get a head start on the workflow of my part-time job. I spent most of this morning loading two days of work into the system so that it can be released automatically Monday evening and Tuesday evening. I should be able to work by Wednesday, if all goes well.
Besides preparing stuff for my job, I did some cooking for next week’s fine dining. The main dish was a vegan “loaf”, what some vegans would call a “no-meat loaf”. I prefer to simply call it a loaf. My loaf is actually a kind of moist bread made with oatmeal, walnuts, quinoa, and kidney beans. Beside the loaf, I made a tomato sauce and a cheese-y sauce. There I go — breaking my own rule. I use cheese-y because it’s a lot easier than saying onion, red bell pepper, and nutritional yeast based sauce.
May 14, Chore Day
/Today’s chore were:
weeding the backyard “lawn”. I call it a “lawn” because the ground is covered with weeds that look like grass until they become obnoxious weeds. Today we used brute force to dig them out. My fear is that all of the billions of tiny roots they left behind will have their revenge next spring.
doing laundry
washing clothes
That’s it for today.
A blast from the past
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1-3-2020
A marker sketch from 2020, back when I was drawing on actual paper with pen and ink, and markers. I didn’t think much of this picture in 2020, but now I like it a lot. Whenever I like an old picture, I think, “I should have stuck with the style and gotten really good at it. I would have a style!” Instead I jump from one style to another. I’m fickle and easily distracted. What a mess!
To make time for working on my book, I’ve stopped studying Spanish, and Swedish, and Finnish, and Japanese. I need that study time for my big project — my book. Instead of studying in the morning, I now work on my book for an hour. I miss learning all of those crazy languages, but my time is short, and art is long.
Page 65 now has the beginnings of a background
/Next week the second wave of applicants will be pounding down the doors where I work. My workload will balloon from a manageable 100% to a mind-boggling 400%. Because my 100% workload has been bearable, I’ve been able to work on my book in the evening. With the new workload, the book may have to go on hiatus for the next two months.
A taxing day
/Besides baking some peanut butter cookies and tempeh coated with cornmeal and spicy buffalo sauce, I attempted, once again, to get the Intuos tablet working on macOS … and failed again. To solve the problem I bought Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for Windows. Problem solved, I hope.
Speaking of the unexpected, there’s always taxes. When I filed my taxes this year, I forgot to include some income. When I filed the amended tax form, I had to return all of the refund we got. That’s life.
macOS vs the Intuos Tablet
/Beside doing chores today (vacuuming and laundry), I spent hours trying to get my Wacom Intuos tablet working on my Mac. Here’s how it went.
I go to the Wacom site, find the instructions for fixing the Intuos/macOS problem. I follow the instructions. I restart the computer, and the tablet works. I turn off the computer, try the tablet, and it doesn’t work.
I figure I must have done something wrong. I do everything over, but I go even further — I search the entire file system for anything named “wacom” and delete everything I find. I restart the computer, reinstall the Wacom software, restart the computer, and it works. When I log out and restart the computer, nothing works.
This Intuos tablet simply isn’t going to work on macOS unless, perhaps, I revert to a previous version of macOS. But, I’m not going to do that. Instead I’m going to stop banging my head against the wall. When I want to work in ArtStudio Pro on my Mac, I’ll use my Cintiq.
Just enough time to open Clip Studio Paint for a few minutes
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More layoffs coming at my day job. The layoffs go like this. No full-timers are laid off before all the part-timers are laid off. This is nothing new — these have always been the rules since forever. But there have never been layoffs before. Fortunately, I have a plan B, which is to replace my part-time job income with the income I earn from selling books. Oh! Did I mention that I had $13.97 in sales over the last 12 months. I’m going to have to elevate my game.
