My Inspiration For August's Masthead... (and then nothing else about the boy for the rest of the week, I swear)

Thanks to Nana Whitney, this is his new favorite thing to do while at the office with me: listen to Baby Einstein on the iPod. f'shizzle.

Waterbabies!

Yesterday my friend Chante invited me to go to the pool with her and her almost 8 month old, Brecken. It was so much fun! Carter hated the initial shock of getting in the pool, but once we were in for a few minutes, he was content turning into a prune with the rest of us. It was nice to sit and chat with my friend while our kids splashed their hands in the water. We spent an hour in the pool (reapplying sunscreen about evern 47 seconds), and then when I pulled him out, he fell asleep in the middle of me changing him into dry clothes. He slept on my chest while Chante and I talked another hour by the side of the pool.

Me as a Disney Character

I recently ran into a dear friend on Facebook that I haven't seen in five or six years. It's been so fun to recall old memories. Drew and I used to sing in choir together and I thought he was the most artistic person I knew. His dearest professional ambition was to work for Walt Disney as an illustrator/animator. I have often wondered if he made it there or not... he certainly had the talent! I'll never forget the sketchbook he carried with him everywhere. It contained (among a gazillion other things) concept art for "Disney's 12 Dancing Princesses", which he someday dreamed of animating for Disney. His inspiration for the 12 princesses were his friends, and I was honored when he drew me as one of them.

Now that we've somewhat reconnected, I have been looking at his online art gallery, which I find overwhelmingly inspiring. His talent has flourished and whenever I open the lappy to take a look, I find myself losing lots of time scrolling through his brilliant drawings. Lo and behold, last night I came across a folder in his gallery called "Disney Concept Art". My eyes fell upon a cartooned depiction of me in my prom dress (I went with Drew's best friend). My hair looks just as I remember that night and after a second of silence upon discovering the drawing, I cheered out loud with my hands in the air.

(I'm on the left. If you click you can see my name scratched into his book. He didn't finish my face in this picture, but still.)

I was so excited to see this last night! What an amazing talent, and the above picture is NOTHING! Drew's out of town and unreachable until March 2008, when he'll be back and ready for Disney to beg for him.

Here's a link to his gallery - Harry Potter fans watch out - I promise he's an even bigger fanatic than you (in fact, I sometimes wonder if he actually thinks he is HP) and he has about 100 or so little HP delights in there to gobble up.

So here's his site: Drew Graham's Gallery
And a few of my favorites are here, here, and here.

Maybe I Just Have a Little Problem, Okay!?

90%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Free Online Dating from Mingle²

Compartmentalizing

There are so many little joys in life that make my eyes sparkle, and I know that some of those things are of little to no interested to you, my beloved three readers... so in an effort to keep you entertained (and in response to some sisterly complaints), I've decided to split my blogging self into a few different areas. Virtual split-personality disorder, if you will. I now have four blogs for you to keep track of, don't you love me?? Well, at least this way you can completely ignore the blogs you don't find interesting. But you have to go to each of my blogs just every once in a while to comment and make me feel special. It's a good chunk of the reasons I blog in the first place... to read the comments.

So here are the blogs and what you'll find in each:
1. Domestication in Progress (DIP) - this is a blog with many contributors. We mainly post recipes. I'm quite enjoying cooking lately, except on week nights. I love to cook when it's special, I hate to cook for the sake of eating merely to stay alive.

2. Banana Colada - All things design and art just speak to me! I am a fragrance designer, media makeup artist, graphic designer, doodler, and lover of all beautiful things including nature, food, music, dance, paper, books, school supplies, and pina-coladas with banana mixed in. Enjoy my findings!

3. Kenna's Vision Board - If you haven't seen The Secret, click to order it now. Here's where I'll post my vision board and if you don't hurry and watch The Secret, you'll soon start to think I've become completely delusional and narcissistic. It's not the case at all, I'm just completely happy and grateful to be practically perfect in every way!

4. ShrekLovesFiona - here's where I'll continue to post about family, friends, passing thoughts, book-movies-music reviews, and the occasional rant about stupid drivers.

Selective Color

Okay, I've been asked how to make an entire picture black and white except for specified highlight areas. So here's how to do it using Photoshop:

Start with a color photo like this:

Make a duplicate layer of the photo.

Make the duplicate layer black and white (there are a gazillion ways to do this, the easiest is to go to Image > Mode > Grayscale, and then adjust the Brightness and Contrast to your liking.)

Use your eraser to erase back in color highlights.

Flatten your image. Done!

In the image below, I used a soft-edged eraser to erase only the eyes from the B&W layer. I did some additional processing when converting to B&W for more of a grunge look.

Should I Be Worried?

So it appears someone has not only plagiarized my blog name and my wedding picture, but also has some sort of sick, sick crush on my husband. Shrek Loves Danny!?

Here's hoping he doesn't know my address. Freak.

Swiss Chicken

Do you know what "Hump Day" meals are? Think Wednesday night, which is the night of the week you find yourself most tired - It's as far into the week as you can get, without being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel (weekend) quite yet. A "Hump Day" meal means it's the perfect meal for one of those nights where you hardly have enough energy to climb into bed after work, let alone make dinner, then THIS, my friends, is a Hump Day Dinner! This one is so easy, and very simple to adjust for more or less servings.  This recipe is by my mom:

Ingredients:
6 chicken breasts
6 slices swiss cheese
1 can Cream of Chicken soup
1/2 cup water
1 cup bread crumbs
1 stick melted butter

Directions
1. Clean and arrange chicken breasts in a casserole dish.
2. Place one slice of swiss cheese on each breast.
3. Mix the Cream of Chicken soup with the water and pour/spread it over the chicken.
4. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top.
5. Drizzle butter on top of bread crumbs
6. Bake 1 hour at 350 degrees, or until chicken is done (juices run clear in middle) The swiss cheese, cream of chicken, and butter make the gravy.

I served it with rice (whatever kind I had in the pantry). When the rice was done, I rolled in a bag of heated-up frozen veggie medley. Easy! And the chicken turns out very tender (I am picky about chicken!)

Laughing

Domestication in Progress

Tonight I wanted to make Linguine with Clams, but I learned the hard (and expensive) way that you're supposed to buy clams live, the day you plan to cook them. I bought mine 5 days ago and they've been wrapped up in my fridge. They're dead. And dead is bad. So tonight we had the below instead - my first try at anything scampi, and my own little combination of three different recipes.

Grilled Shrimp Scampi Linguine

Dishes You'll Need:
Large Pot
Large Frying Pan
Grill (or one of these, which is what I used)
Small Mixing Bowl

Ingredients:
1 lb linguine pasta
6 garlic cloves
a couple generous handfuls of fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil (eyeball it)
24-36 medium size raw shrimp, peeled, deveined, and tails removed
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 cup dry white wine (eyeball it)
zest and juice of 1 lemon
5 tbsp cold unsalted butter
salt and pepper

Preheat your grill on high.

Boil water over high heat in the large pot. Salt the water and cook the linguine until al dente (Steve told me that's 2 minutes less than the directions on the box). Heads up: you'll be using a couple of ladles of cooking water before draining the pasta.

While the water for the pasta is heating up, use your small mixing bowl to combine the garlic, parsley, salt, pepper, and extra virgin olive oil. Put half of it in your large frying pan and put it on the stove. Throw your shrimp in the bowl with the other half of the olive oil mixture and stir it to coat evenly. Then transfer your coated shrimp to the grill, cooking about 2-3 minutes on each side until shrimp are firm and opaque.

While shrimp are grilling and pasta is cooking, go back to your large frying pan that's on the stove with your olive oil mixture in it. After it's been cooking for about 2 minutes (garlic will be lightly golden brown) add the wine and cook for another minute. Then add 2 ladles of the past cooking water and the lemon zest and juice and cook for another 2 minutes. Add the butter and stir until melted. Add the grilled shrimp, toss to coat the shrimp. Then add the drained pasta and toss to coat again. Divide the pasta and shrimp among 4 serving plates.

Gaussian Blur

I've been using Photoshop at least an hour a day (sometimes 10 hours) for the last five years. I know the program rather well, relative to, I guess, most people I know. But in relation to all there is to know, I know close to nothing. This program amazes me every time I learn something new with it. There are at least 100 buttons, functions, and menu items I have no idea how to use yet. One graphic designer I worked with several years ago told me I'd never learn everything, and that he had been designing for over a decade and still didn't know the half of what Photoshop can do. Lately I've been playing with Gaussian Blur and really like what it's done to my portraits, although it can be used on just about anything - I used it on a flowers and fruit arrangement once.

Here's the Before and After:


And here's how to get the effect:

1. Adjust the color balance, curves, brightness, and contrast to your liking. (I usually like to up the contrast just a tiny bit in almost all my pictures to bring the colors out)

2. Once you're happy with lighting, etc. Make a duplicate copy of the layer.

3. Apply a Gaussian Blur to the layer on TOP. On a high-resolution image about 20-25% works well, but what you're going for is the face to be just blurry enough that the nose disappears and you can't quite recognize the person. The perfect percentage will vary with each photo.

4. On your Layers palate, there is a drop-down just to the left of the opacity selector. It's set to "Normal" by default. On the layer you just blurred, change the setting to "Multiply".

5. Don't freak out because your picture just went super-dark. Stay on your blurry layer and adjust the Curves up until the picture looks good again.

If after doing all this the picture is blurry, then your Gaussian Blur percentage was set too high. It takes a few practices before you'll consistently guess correctly on your blur percentage, but the warm and fuzzy look is well worth it! In my picture above, I used a higher percentage than normal for an extra fuzzy look. Look at that tan!!

I'll post more Photoshop tips as I get questions for them. Comment here if you have one!

Too Scared of Bugs

Tonight I went out on the deck to water my plants and there was this huge, beautiful dragonfly on the railing. I ran for the camera, planning to perfectly capture the glitter in its wings, only to realize I was way too terrified to go close enough to use macro-mode. With a flash it was crap, and without a flash, it came out horribly blurry, probably because I was half inside the house, half a step down on the deck, so as to remain safely away from the fly-away zone, and it was hard to keep everything steady.

So I pulled the blurry version into Photoshop, applied a poster edges filter, removed the railing from behind the bug, added a little color, and voila! Cute now, not scary at all!

Before:

Enjoying

Two things I hope you enjoy as much as I did:

1. Ingenious ad for Sony Bravia featuring a lot, no, a LOT of paint.

2. Best of all three: the Pink Prank Project. "Our friend Jacob who is a bit arty went to New York for a week. We got hold of his keys and turned his tiny and messy flat into an art installation." Awesome.

It Was Very Fireworks

Today at the office we received a call from a Japanese business acquaintance:

"Good morning, how was your day off?"

"It was great, thank you! How about yours?"

"Oh yes, it was very fireworks!"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Steve's grandma lives literally within rock-throwing distance of the BYU football stadium, which becomes "The Stadium of Fire!" on the 4th of July. Every year, the whole family sits on her front lawn where we have a better view of the fireworks than anyone who actually bought tickets.

I've always loved Independence Day. I love fireworks, hot summer nights, and sitting around on the lawn chatting with family. I love watching my nieces and nephews squeal with delight about how this firework went even higher in the air than the last one and had better colors. Oh, how would life be if my only care in the world was making sure I got to hold just as many sparklers as my brother. It makes me wonder where along the line I lost the child-like sparkle in my eye for exciting things like fireworks.



I held Carter in my lap while we watched the fireworks. Surprisingly, I did more jumping at loud booms and pops than he did, and at one point, I looked down at him just as his entire face lit up with fascination for the flashing lights and colors. In that moment I felt just as much delight for those fireworks as I did when I was six years old. He sat and cooed at those lights for an hour, and all the while I realized that because of him, I get to do it all again. Not just fireworks, but hide and seek, coloring books, and blanket forts. Silly songs, Duck, Duck, Goose, swings, stickers, and sand castles. I now get to watch him light up like a sparkler at all of these things, and I can already tell, the second time around will be even more thrilling.

Bridge to Terabithia

Last weekend I finished my first book for the SRT. I remember reading Bridge to Terabithia when I was younger and really liking it, but I didn't remember anything about the story. Because of the movie previews from last year, I expected the book to be about the magical, imaginary kingdom of Terabithia, and was at first disappointed to find that it's not at all about that. In fact nothing in the book talked about anything happening in Terabithia, rather just mentions that the main characters, Jess and Leslie, created it and "went" there every day after school to play.

(spoiler this paragraph) After finishing, I was okay with the fact that this book wasn't about Terabithia, but about the bridge - a bridge that allows Jess to move on with life after the death of a loved one. A bridge to memories that remind him it's okay to imagine...dare...believe.

I give the book 3 stars out of 5 because it was very slow moving and seemed to not have a plot at all until the last several pages when you realize the book is about a child dealing with the loss of a friend, and not about a magical kingdom. If the book was twice as long as it is, I probably wouldn't have finished it. Boring, but soulful... if those two words are allowed to describe the same thing.

I rented the movie and really enjoyed it. The casting was perfect and I feel the movie was everything the book wasn't. It added in a few exciting scenes about what happened in Terabithia and the family dynamics were much more poignant in the movie than in the book. Add in music, cinematography, etc., and the movie was much more powerful than the book. Still, for a movie, it gets 3 out of 5 as well.