Spring in Portland

Spring arrives in mid February and it's spring in Portland.  Today it was sunny and about fifty so we went for a four mile walk.  Here are some of the sights along the way.

Here's a house John worked on.  Nice porch, huh?

This is the fanciest dressed window washer I ever saw.  She makes me think of the good witch in the wizard of Oz.

And here are some houses I liked.

 And it was nice enough for a little reading on the porch.

The daphne is blooming and the air was full of the scent, which is divine.

Excel as a design tool

I don't own any fancy graphics design tools.  I've tried a few and they always seem hard to learn and have many more features than I need.  I am pretty happy with what I can do with Excel, MS Photo Editor and Picasa.  I start with Excel using just borders, drawing tools and colors and a macro that makes square cells.

You can change the Excel color palette, which is key.  Here is a simple quilt design I did in Excel and then pasted into MS Photo Editor so it is a .jpg file.  It shows the colors, design and fabric requirements.  I like the colors a lot but am having some trouble finding the right fabrics.

Sometimes I lay out a single block and take a photo of the block. It looks like this after it has been cropped:

Then I open several copies in MS Photo Editor and put them together.  I can also rotate the blocks (the second row is made of rotated blocks):

I can get a pretty good idea of what the whole quilt will look like by putting lots of blocks together.

I also sometimes download fabric photos from on-line quilt shops/fabric manufacturers to use in this process.  That helps me decide if I want to buy a fabric for my quilt.  This doesn't work perfectly since the photos sometimes are not accurate representations of the colors, but it's still pretty helpful.

I use Excel for lots of design problems.  I designed our kitchen cabinets with Excel.  You can look at that here.

Portland isn't supposed to look like this

Our house....

Photo taken by neighbors across the street

John shoveled the walk and the stairs and the porches and the back yard but you can't tell anymore.

We are busy keeping the hummingbird feeders thawed and nuts and seeds out for the birds and squirrels.  The cats are enjoying the wildlife immensely.

John was diligent and put out the trash for pick up, well actually, just the debris and recycling.  They only pick up trash every other week and not this week.  Actually, it looks like they aren't picking up ANYTHING this week.

What Portlanders do in the snow....

Snowman at the Lucky Lab Pub

Another lap quilt

As I said I might here, I changed my mind about its size.  I had planned to make it 9 by 9 squares, which would be 81 inches on a side.  I stopped at 7 by 7 (63 inches on a side).  John wants to use it as his napping quilt and it seemed the right size to him.  I haven't bound it yet and I could make it bigger.  It's in trial use now.  One of the cool things about this technique is it's so easy to change your mind.  I think a repair would be easy, too (cats are hard on fabric items).

I took it out on the porch where the light is better.  My camera needs good light to capture the colors correctly.  This is much more how it looks to my eye.  And it is better if you click on the pictures.

Playing with food

This one appeals to me.  How fun!

from Piano Sandwich

Hurricane force winds in the gorge

It's been very windy in the gorge recently, especially at Crown Point, which is only a little more than 20 miles from our house.  You can read this explanation of the weather phenomenon that causes these high winds.

And here is a video that illustrates just how windy it was...

Stress eating

Ozy is our diabetic cat and dealing with his health is a real challenge; I've written a little about it before.  It's not the DOING of the care.  It's the roller coaster of ups and downs of his uncontrolled blood glucose, the decisions about his insulin dose, his pain level, when to get help.

This is what I crave when the roller coaster stress and sleep deprivation become too much.  I know they aren't "good for me" but maybe they are better for me than the stress and sleep deprivation.