CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

One of the things I recognised is that I would need to digitise my artwork in order to incorporate it into books, or to ship it to anyone interested in purchasing it... should I ever get good enough, and that reminded me that there are programs out there that are quite powerful, but not so intuitive to use. Gimp, for instance, is free, but has its own quirks. I decided I would try to get my head around what this tool could do... or, perhaps, what I could manage to achieve with the tool. I wanted to isolate the rosebuds from the background clutter by cutting them out. This is done using the 'Free Select Tool'. This is not as easy as it seems, because the clipboard will only take 525x525 pixels. There was much cussing and crying until I worked out I had to shrink the longest edge of the image to 525 BEFORE I began my cut. Of course, the trickiest thing is to remember to write down the original dimensions of the picture and then return the finalised image to the original size.

The crimson rosellas aren't the only Australian cockatoos who like the pine trees on my morning walk. These sulphur-crested cockatoos were busy proving they *will* chew something other than power-lines (see previous post on these guys). There were three of them, busy vandalising the top of this pine tree: Suspect #1, tried to look innocent: Suspect #2 had a very devil-may-care attitude and kept right on munching: Suspect #3 proved too difficult to photograph, but Suspect #1 made up for it, by slowly stalking another branch: I guess he thought if he acted casual, no one would suspect: And then he struck: Suspect #2 wanted to know what I was gonna do about it:

Another hot week in Oz... but one with two days of relief—and by that I mean that I had two days under thirty degrees Celsius, one of which was less than 25. Awesome! We have no air-conditioning so temperature regulation is achieved by using black-out curtains, fans and by closing and opening the house windows depending on whether or not the air outside is cooler than the air inside. So far, we’ve managed to keep the internal temperature in the mid-twenties, even on the worst days, but sleep is another matter. Still, amidst all the hustle and bustle of work and family and personal admin, stuff got done, and that’s what matters. Wordage is up (and they’re good words), I’m finally managing to submit ms to paying markets, and the release schedule is on track and looking healthier. I haven’t quite managed to get my ironing under control, and I’ve yet to schedule another drawing schedule, but these things will come.   Overview New words produced: 11,858 Old words revised: 0 W