Getting Ready for the Close!

This is a constant sight in our house -- Warren's beloved cat, Mickey, begging for a treat which Warren will oblige him with very quickly. He makes his wants known. We have no idea how old Mickey is but we think he is getting on in years. We got him as a stray about a year ago and he fits right in with the other two seniors in this house.


Things seem to be moving at a frenetic pace on the new house and maybe my age is showing these days! Poor Lisa has been doing most of the work at her end as she lives a lot closer to the new house than we do. I have tried to do my share but inevitably it leads back to her having to make the final phone calls because she is physically going to be doing the bill paying. The last few days it seems as though everything I do has something wrong with it like missing digits in account numbers or misreading my own handwriting! I couldn't even get our local paper to cease delivery for a week until the third phone call (first two phone numbers were out of service!) Very annoying.



The good news is that except for the annoyance of losing a couple of days of transferring the money because I had one too few digits in the account number of the receiving bank, everything else seems to be done and we are down to the minute details. There never seems to be a day when there isn't one of those details popping up though.



It will be fun to camp out at the new house (literally as there is no furniture yet) and go to the local kite festival this weekend. I found out that one of the three branches of the North Carolina Aquarium is very closeby as well as a nature preserve -- yippee, lots of pictures and hopefully some nice blue crab at some point as well! The average yearly temp is in the mid-60's so I guess that is why there is a palm tree in the front yard -- NC always seems a bit north for palm trees but with global warming, they may be in Rochester before too long!


Monday evenings are spent learning how to use Photoshop with an awesome local instructor in an adult education class! His wife is a quilter and recommended the class as a good way to learn the software and she was really right! I spent the evening removing people's heads and whole bodies from photos!! What fun!! And I finally learned what a Photoshop layer is -- yehhh

This is one of my daugter Lisa's pictures from Namibia which had a big black shadow on the left hand side which I thought could be improved upon!


We learned how to do cloning and healing tonight and also layers and removing peoples and objects from pictures. Great fun!! I didn't even try too hard and I am sure it could be improved further if I took a little more time with it. Isn't it cool to be able to fix photos though!

I like to use my own photos as well as Lisa's as sources for new quilts. She has been to Africa twice now and would go again without a moment's hesitation. I had the wonderful opportunity to go there close to 40 years ago now -- an experience you never ever forget -- I still occasionally dream about it and going back! Of course we didn't have the wonderful digital cameras back then!