Cicada Days

New rainboots on one of our balmy days.

It was great to see Katie and Nicole at the 2peas crop. It was wonderful just to catch up, but they also had tons of good photography advice. One great tip was to download some noise filtering software. I found this software, which is free, on the advice of lots of people on 2peas. I've run it on a handful of photos where I had to add fill light from underexposing, and it made them look so much better. They also let me know that Pioneer woman has a second set of free actions available, my favorite one being the eye sharpening action. I really like her sepia combined with the boost from the first set, too. And they told me to check out this photographer's amazing work.

I love Jessica Sprague's list of 100 ideas to scrapbook. I just finally got an upgrade of PSE Elements - 6.0 - so I can start following her tutorials more easily. I still have the full version of Photoshop CS2 on my other computer, but it is nice not to have to stumble around in the dinosaur of Elements 2.0 on our new desktop now.

I'm pretty familiar with most of the good font sites, but I missed this one. It had a font called Anivers that I was able to get free. I like it because it is similar to the font Myriad, which I love, but I don't really want to pay for. MyFonts requires a quick e-mail and password to register, but seems worth it for the 400+ free fonts they have. And since we upgraded our computer, I had to re-download the free Pea fonts from here. The one I would miss most would be Peajay. I noticed there are a lot more new ones, I need to find time to check them out. Look how fun this one is. Another fun font I like lately is Establo, which is free, and great for titles.

In other worlds besides scrapbooking (are there others?) we've been using this spelling website for helping Maddie practice for her tests. She loves it. We've been baking many batches of these lately. And since I'm trying to use more turmeric in our meals (because it is being written about as such a health boon) this recipe for gypsy soup is our favorite so far. It is great as is, but I also add meat to it.

I'm on a new music kick lately. Generally, I find new music through Pandora.com. And then when I really want to listen to something in the car, I will buy it at iTunes so I can put it on my iPod. But I'm buying less because I've finally started using online playlist sites. Two of the most popular are Imeem and Playlist.com. Just search for whatever songs you want and add them to your playlist with one click. Then you can access your playlists from any computer. I should have started doing this a lot sooner.

Okay, back to scrap world again. Just for a minute. I love these toy camera frames from 2 peas. I have to stop myself from putting them on every photo I print:

Those are photos from our first trip 2 years ago to The Farm in Door County. I can't wait to go again this summer. That is, if Winter ever ends. And, oh: a little while ago, I heard Maddie tell Mia that when you die, you go to heaven and get stickers. Huh. I hope they're at least, like, puffy stickers or the scratch-and-sniff kind. Cuz otherwise, letdown.