AC Transfigured

At a recent stop at the Dark & Deadly cafe, I did what I often do and took a snapshot of one of the characters. Without doing a before and after, I will show how the finished product looked after I added a hellfire background (AI) although I don't recall the exact descriptive term that I used.

I liked it well enough but then had the notion to replace the skeleton's skull with my own head.

While the fire was an AI interpolation, the head swap was completed via old-fashioned, manual photoshopping.

Back in the Saddle Again

I am not sure when we last got the bikes out, but I know we didn't bike at all last year and possibly not the preceding year either. My last cycling endeavour pulled a muscle in my leg, I think from going up an incline too rapidly. We've been out twice now, keeping to smooth roads for the most part while pedaling gently and avoiding inclines as much as we can.

On day 2, I recorded our route and mileage. It's not impressive, but it still felt good.

We've been riding with the cute neighbourhood boy whom we keep between us: me in the lead and Sue keeping watch at the back. So far, it is good to have him with us because kid-sized bikes can’t go as fast as big bikes although we wouldn’t be booting it anyway at this point in our lives. 

We have our phones mounted, and Sue managed some photos to take some photos.

Here's a larger version of one of the above pictures as we cycled through the neighbourhood park. 

It feels good to get back in the saddle again. In my early days of blogging I wrote about our rides periodically if not frequently. We enjoyed riding pretty fair distances. It's different now, of course, but it is still a pleasant activity. As we approach our 80s (we are both 79 or will be very shortly), we feel secure in our balance and hope that our bodies allow us to continue this activity in its present, reduced form.

Resurrecting the Fiddle

Sue had another post for brown week that also called for hands. She chose to use my old fiddle for the brown part of the prompt along with my very own personal hands. Once again, these are her photos but my edits. I present this one first because it didn't work out as well as I had hoped.

I thought to render the photo b&w except for the violin, but I don't think that it worked for the hands. Oh well, we move on to try other edits with other photos.

For the next photo I made sure to darken the background a lot but keep the relevant part colourized. I am content with this image.

It was difficult to just get my hands and the fiddle both in the photo while eliminating distractions, so Sue had me hold the instrument differently and not as if I were playing it.

I think Sue used the last photo for her group, but her edit would different than mine. I post that conclusion pretty safely, even without having compared the two results.

The story with the violin or fiddle is that it has sat unused for a decade. When we first moved here, seeing as this is an area with a fiddling tradition, I did take some lessons and even showed up at a jam or two. Finger and back issues kept me from practising as much as I should before causing me to shut it down entirely. I did have quite a bit of enjoyment with the instrument for about five years although an old guy who couldn't practise as much as necessary never became very proficient.

My body, being what it is, and the instrument requiring a tuning and perhaps replacement of strings, I did not attempt to play a single note on the day of this photoshoot.

By the way, for those who don't know, a fiddle and a violin are exactly the same instrument, and so I used both words in this post. Fiddling is a certain style of music.

Saturday Morning

We weren't sure what to expect on Saturday morning after our neighbour informed us that we has a flat tire on Friday evening. Should we call CAA for an on-the-spot repair or perhaps even a tow, or should we try to fill it and take it into our tire guy just about a mile down the road?

We opted to fill it using the electric pump for our bicycle tires.

It worked and I was at the garage by about 8 o'clock. The big worry was whether we would need a new tire, and if so, should we replace the whole shebang. On one hand, the tires are hardly new, but on the other, our mileage was still relatively low because we are low-mileage kinda folk.

What with the many thousands spent on the roof and house this summer plus more than a thousand either spent or already committed on car repairs (mostly brakes but more too), I wasn't terribly keen an another major financial outlay.

It turned out that we had picked up a decking screw and that it was removed and the tire patched for a relatively modest sum.

Still early, we drove downtown to purchase two blueberry scones to go. Then, we drove through Tims for coffee, and we took our goodies to the park where we found a picnic table where we could enjoy our comestibles. Both the coffee and the scones were quite wonderful.

There were few passersby in the park, but there was much activity on the river with races being run via commands from a loudspeaker near us.

I took a short clip of one race beginning. What it does not show, in the interest of time and bandwidth is the jockeying and instructions to get the craft lined up in decent order. It took a fair amount of patience and cajoling, let me tell ya. (Edit; I see that the video is unavailable for some reason.)

I also took a couple of photos.

For fun, I asked AI for a watercolour version of the second photo. Curiously, it added a sky.

We walked a little, and Sue made friends with a dog.

After sitting on another a bench for awhile, decided to head back to the car because it was looking a bit like rain. The drops began to fall just as we got back to the vehicle.

Through the Brown with AC

Sue's prompt on a recent day involved brown and through. There is brown on the girders of the old railway overpass and in the rocky walls, and we do walk through the tunnel by times. Since I am in a mood for hubris today, I am going to show you a lot of me. The photos are hers, edits mine.

Off to the south side of the tunnel, there is brown in the tree trunks and path, and I will be walking through the foliage up above.

And to the north, there are places in the little Hackberry Park for Sue to shoot through the brown trees to lil, ole me.

The good thing wss that I was so far away that I didn't have to smile my silly smile for these photos.

Happy Saturday and a fine weekend to you. 

Orphan Photos 7

The first two orphan photos go back to June. On two nights, we walked to the park when the sun was beginning to set in the west. The elevated trees to the east caught golden light from the lowering sun from the opposite direction. There was a lot of reflection in the pond, but it was messy and even distracted from the lit tree, so I cropped most of the pond out.

When I returned two nights later, I just focused on the reflection, and I like the photo more. We often want to include everything in a photo, but the better photos tend to leave a lot of things out.

Early in July, we sighted the heron from the trail bridge. This was my third heron photo of the year, all of the same heron, I presume.

The next photo is from mid July: a coneflower in the park. As much as I like all coneflowers, the two-toned ones really appeal to me.

Finally, when we walk the bridge trail, we sometimes pass this house at a point where the trail crosses a street. It's not spectacular but I do see it as a pleasant house.

Oh, I do have one more. It's a photo of dandelions from five years past. I think that five years makes it an special orphan.

Tennis X 2

This week, for our second tennis watch of the summer, I am back to watching the game via my tablet on my lap while Sue watches it on the far television (photo below). Sue is more far-sighted and also sees brighter than I, so she can track the ball on our less than wonderful tv, but I tend to lose track of the ball after the serve. Meanwhile, my tablet has a great screen, and I can easily follow the play. (BTW, I did try to brighten the tv display last year, but the results weren't great, so I just returned it back to normal.)

For some reason, I am able to follow the ball fairly well on the old tv during Wimbledon but lose track of it at other events. Having written all of that, I can sometimes follow it in this tournament as well; it seems to depend on the brightness of the day.

This way we can still watch together. There is sometimes a little difficulty getting the two streams to jive, but I can usually finagle around the problem with a little judicious pausing on whichever stream happens to be ahead of the other.

Currently, we are watching the Canadian Open, properly called the National Bank Open. It is one of the nine Masters 1000 events that rank below the four grand slams but above the other tour events for tour points and prize money. 

My computer monitor is also up to snuff, so when Sue trundles off to bed, I watch it in my den.

One odd thing is that even though two devices, tablet and tv, are synced, I often get different commercials, or at least the commercials are played in a different order. I find that very weird. At first, I feared that the streams were out of sync again, but when play resumed, all was fine. This is not a one-off; the commercials play differently on the two devices each and every time. As I already said, weird!