one in five billion

When my friend Denise saw my “winter to spring” series of paintings that I painted for my loungeroom wall, she asked if I could paint something similar for her in colours to match her living room.

Immediately I felt two things at once:

Extremely honoured that she would think my work is good enough to hang on her wall, and;

Terrified that I would screw it up!

Her living room has lots of shades of olive greens. This is what I came up with:

I had to stand on a chair and hold the camera over my head to take this photo, so it’s not great.

I haven’t shown the painting to Denise yet – I hope she likes it! It’s scary painting for others but so much fun!

This week’s challenge on Inspire Me Thursday is:

I thought this was a very interesting topic! I was a bit too lazy to get my paints out, and my scrapbooking stuff was right next to me, so I made my inkblot using a piece of scrapbooking paper, some blobs of Making Memories paint (the only colour I have is pink!) and some Kindy Glitz. I folded the paper in half, and this is what it looked like:

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So I thought I might start a short series of posts about the new blog. Why? Well, a couple of reasons: firstly, I’m a web developer, and doing ‘web stuff’ is not only my job, but one of my interests as well, so I like to talk a bit about that type of thing; secondly, I have added, or will be adding, some new features that the old blog didn’t have, so I wanted to let people know about them, as well as the differences between the old blog and the new one. So here goes:

• The Design – probably the most obvious change between the two. While we still love blue, this design features less of it, but hopefully with more impact! KAPOW! You’ll also notice that instead of the old two-column layout, we have a new two-column layout! The problem with having a column for each of us was that it wasn’t always obvious what the most recent post was. Well, now we share a column, and the most recent post from either of us is always at the top. I’ve also added author images to each post (they used to be at the top of each column) which a) helps identify who made what post, and b) allows me to indulge my penchant for changing my image (usually in relation to whatever the topic of my latest Geek Rant™ is – oh yes, they’re coming back). And as I mentioned in my first post on the new blog, the design is still in the process of growing and evolving, so expect to see further changes every now and then in the near future.
• Smaller front page posts – well, apart from this one that is. Kirsten has already made nice use of WordPress‘s ‘read all’ function, where you can have just a short part of the post display on the front page, then have readers click through to the full post (no, I’m not using it here, but will be in future posts). I didn’t like the length of the old blog’s front page, so this helps manage that. The front page will also show the 5 most recent posts – seemed like a good round number
• Auto-updated archives – Kirsten always used to get annoyed (and rightly so) by the fact that I had to manually add a link to each month’s posts for each of us (and often forgot). This was one of the less useful results of hacking gracefully blending together three separate Blogger based blogs into one single blog. WordPress of course does this automatically for us. Kirsten never needs to bug me again! At least not about this particular thing…
• Categories – ever wanted to find all my Geek Rant™ posts in one convenient locations (in Africa)? Probably not, but hell – now you can (or will as the case may be)! Yes, categories are in my friends, and with them comes a whole new way to ignore all my old posts. Of course, those of you who read this feature for K’s scrapbooking and craft-related posts will find it very useful indeed.
• RSS – if you don’t know what RSS is, you most likely don’t use it, and can probably skip this point. If you do, and you are, read on! I use RSS to subscribe to feeds on a number of different sites and blogs – useful, since many won’t send you an email when a new post or article is added. I always ‘got’ the usefulness of having a posts feed, but it wasn’t until last week when Dan B flipped a light switch (figuratively, not literally) for me, that I ‘got’ having a comments feed: if you wanted to know when someone replied to a comment you left somewhere. Duh! Links to each feed are in the footer, and your RSS-aware browser should have made you aware of the posts feed already.

Well, there you go. Some of that might have made sense, all of it might have made sense, or none of it might have made sense, depending on who you are. Hopefully it didn’t bore you (too much) regardless of who you are. Expect a few more posts on the blog as changes are made – and filed under ‘The Blog’.

If you didn’t already think I was enough of a nerd, than this should convince you:

I just got back from a weekend getaway, scrapbooking from Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon. As always on scrapping camp I had a fantastic time, even if I am a little exhausted (I really need a weekend to get over my weekend!)

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One of the reasons I was so looking forward to having this blog again was so that I could participate in Inspire Me Thursday again. Inspire Me Thursday is a website where a new prompt is posted each week, as inspiration to create something artistic. I haven’t done much art in the past year or so, and thought this would be a great incentive for me. I’ve decided to participate in this week’s “kitchen” challenge. read all »