Pointless bored photo from last month of the day:

Wheee...

And, erm, my apologies for having TLC on while I was doing this. I should have switched to Discovery or the Food Network or something. Especially since that's more usually what's on...

Pointless bored photo from last month of the day:

And then she decided to start moving the camera...

Pointless bored photo from last month of the day:

Nothing like a hand-held double image during a snowstorm, right?

Hmmm. Helicopters, or the weather?

So, I was going to talk about this. But then this horrible crash happened in Glasgow, and somehow it doesn't seem appropriate to talk about fun with remote-controlled helicopters. I'll let you know in a while how many of my plants I've shredded, though.

I guess, then, you get to hear me gripe (briefly. I'm really going to try to make this brief) about what we're in store for.

The pictures you're seeing to the right are from our last big storm at the beginning of November (yeah, I only got them off the camera a few minutes ago. Didn't really want to look at them). Sooo pretty, right? Uh huh. Whatever. If you click on the photo and look closer, you'll see that it was still snowing when I took it. And it kept snowing. And snowing. Listen, Alberta's generally a fairly dry place. We get snow, obviously, but compared to the east we don't get a whole lot. Not so much this year. It's only November, and we've had more snow than we had by January last year. Last year, by the way, wasn't an especially dry one.

Later that same night...

Uh huh. Whatever.

There's been more snow since then, of course, and now we're headed for another major storm. Fun one this time, however. They're predicting 60 km/h winds on Monday, and that combined with heavy snow means that I sure as heck won't be going anywhere for a while.

Naturally, since this is Alberta, the snow is followed by extreme cold. I'd give you a link to our forecast, but it's just too depressing to even bother looking at. So let's look at something else instead. Something I was looking at this morning. Something that apparently had the shakes...

Ok, what really happened was that this was just after the sun came up, and I was shooting through my bedroom window here at Dad's on a veeery slow shutter speed. I'm surprised it looks like a deer at all.

It's pretty normal to see deer browsing the backyard here. What's not normal in November is to see that the snow is already past knee height for them.

To quote Monty Python, bloody weather.

Anyway, that'll do it for me for a few days. Again. I'm going to schedule a couple of pointless photos that I took the night of the last storm when I was bored, mostly just because I don't know what I'll do with them otherwise. See you once I've dug out, folks.

White space

Yeah, still in denial here about the whole winter thing.

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I'm currently (well, not currently. Currently I'm typing this. When I'm done, though, I'll go back to currently doing what I was doing before) working on the nature centre's quarterly newsletter, and my two fans will know that it puts me in a bit of a mood. Editing a newsletter is aggravating, really. Trying to get submissions, trying to get those submissions to sound like they're actually written in English (sometimes that's a little iffy, even in a place like this that's supposed to be all about communication), and then trying to wrestle those submissions into a readable format on the page...

Um, ok. I honestly like that last bit.

I enjoy the aesthetics of a well laid out page. I try pretty hard to make sure that my pages are well laid out, and I like to think that I succeed more often than not. I wouldn't call myself a professional by any means (although technically, since I do get paid to do it...), but I think my pages are reasonably pleasing to the eye. With that in mind, then, three things that I think are important in layouts for newsletters and posters. And, I suppose, by extension blog posts:

Number one. White space. Big surprise on that one, since that's the title of the post. White space is important. It gives the eyes a rest, it makes things look balanced, and it keeps a page from looking like more than just words and words and words. It might surprise you, but I generally take care about white space even here at the home of the blather. There's a reason for the apparently arbitrary line spacing and the occasional weird non-paragraph. Sometimes it's cadence, yes, but sometimes I'm looking for a shape. If I don't like the way the pointless photo's framed by the words, for example, I'll go back and reword and respace until I'm happier.

Number two. Stay away from the dark side. Backgrounds, I mean. Dark backgrounds may look nice, but they're bloody awful to try to read anything on. The other day I was flipping through one of the magazines that we take here at work, and they'd printed not just pages but entire sections on this truly awful shade of brown. I don't know what effect they were trying for, but the affect on me was that I didn't bother reading it.

Number three. DON'T TILE. Yes, that needed caps. Nothing looks cheesier than a tiled background, even if you've got a blank space for text placement. And if there's no blank space at all? There's no readability. I'm reminded of that every single day by a poster here at work that I can't do anything about because I didn't make it. Ah well, it'll be gone next week. Thank Whomever.

Anyway, back to the newsletter. Yay.





I hope yay, at least. A girl's gotta have hope, despite past experiences.

Stupid people in hallways

Yep, still flowers leftover from the summer. I do have seasonal pictures on the camera, but part of me doesn't want to even see them.

More snow on Sunday/Monday. As in, possibly 20 cm more.

I miss flowers, did I mention?

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This post will be short (hopefully) and disjointed (inevitably) because I'm in a state of brain no work. I've been having the sleep thing -- or lack of sleep thing -- again (um, when am I not, exactly?) and last night I finally hit the point where I knew I was going to sleep. I absolutely knew it. Eventually the head and body both do hit that state, even if you're scared they never will. Anyway, I went to bed around 11:30 pm, got to sleep pretty much right away (yay!), and... around 2:30 am what sounded like a half dozen people or so decided to have a fairly loud... let's call it a discussion... in the hallway. A loud, protracted discussion.

And that was it for me and sleep.

*shakes fist at the stupid people of the world*

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On a totally different and much more amusing note, I can't remember if I mentioned that Hugh Laurie finally joined the twitterverse a couple of weeks ago. I find this extremely funny partly because he is funny, but also partly because one of the biggest twitter deniers in the celebrity world is now one of the chattiest. Maybe there's something to this twitter thing, eh Mr Laurie?

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One last thing, then. In an attempt to escape the endless carousel of crappy Christmas songs that watching television for the past couple of days has implanted in my brain (can we say On Yer Mark, Get Set, All Christmas Commercials All The Time, boys and girls?), today's earworm is a German lullaby that I've actually performed called Guter Mond (or An den Mond), and the link is for a very nice a cappella version. This is a great song to sing. Come to it, German is a great language to sing, although I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's just that there's a lot of good German music out there, I dunno. Anyway, if you need a break from rocking around the Christmas tree or whatever earworm's been throttled into your head, maybe give this one a try.

Later, folks.

Sigh

So I post something stupid about eggs, which apparently I'd already pretty much posted about a year ago. And then I disappear for a week. And then I make a half-assed post, and now I'm about to disappear for a couple of days again.

Which means, of course, that I can't think of anything to blather about right now.

Typical for me.

Um, cosmos, then?

That's cosmos in today's pointless photo, for those of my two fans who aren't gardeners. Cosmos is one of my favourite flowers, and I plant it pretty much every year. I like the divided leaves, I like the apparent (only apparent, mind) simplicity of the flowers, and I like that they grow tall enough to block out some of my terribly exciting view of a hotel's loading dock.

Actually, I'm a big fan in general of what some people might consider old-fashioned flowers. Cottage garden stuff. I come by it honestly on both sides of the family, really: my English paternal grandmother's front garden, my maternal grandmother's yearly flats of French marigolds; I like the feel of that kind of thing. Johnny Jump-ups and other violets (heck, let's add in the violas and pansies as well, then), nasturtiums for both their colours and their pepperiness in a salad...

There's over 60 cm of snow on the ground out there right now, by the way. I want some flowers.

Time was (and I really should get back into the habit) that when winter gave me the flower blues I'd pick up a cheap bouquet at the grocery store when I did my shopping. Carnations, usually, but if something else was on cheap I'd vary it. Sometimes, if I was in the doodling mood, I'd do a vase drawing a day until the whole thing was undeniably fit for the garbage. It was good practice, documenting the changes as the flowers aged. Yeah, I really should start doing that again. If there was a holiday sale I'd occasionally buy a live plant rather than a bouquet. Plants that are sold cheap and already flowering don't usually live worth a hoot, but it would extend the drawing period.

Let's just say that I have a lot of doodles of lilies.

Anyway, doodles, flowers, and frigging snow aside, I need to get back to work. See you in a couple of days.

That's the plan, anyway.

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Oh, before I go...

Today's tea: Brazillionaire, which was a sample. I'm... I dunno what I feel about this one. It's good, but it's a little odd somehow. I think maybe it's that I'd like the brazil nuts by themselves. I really like brazil nuts.

I wonder if anyone has Christmas brazil nuts out yet...