campfire anthems

this was a good great week.

hello blogosphere.  typically i am the one giving out photoshop tips and lessons but today i am in need of your help.  i have to create a graphic and want to make the text appear to be made of glass.  do any of you have any good methods of how i can do this?  i appreciate any help that is given and will let everyone know whose idea worked the best.  thanks guys.

alright face of a generation…its time to face the fact that your bookshelf has been breached. oh, but don’t worry. your precious book is safe…for now. you will receive a list of demands in due time. don’t try anything stupid or you’ll never see it in one piece again. i bet it would be a great charcoal substitute for a fat ribeye on my grill…

check out this 11 year old kid on his razor scooter.

in addition to creating wallpapers each month and doing my new weekly posts for photoshop tips, i have decided that i want to start making t-shirts to sell on my webpage.  don’t worry guys, it will all be legal with my small business license i’m working to acquire.  now, before i put in all the effort and figure out expenses i really want to know how much interest is there for this.  i’m excited about seeing this thing through. hopefully you are too.  let me know guys.

my job as a designer requires me to use photoshop. recently, i have really been playing with it in my space time and honing my skills to make myself more useful to potential clients, and to just have fun. i’ve gotten pretty good at altering photos and manipulating things to look the way i want them to. i came across this video and it really made me think. i think this is part of what is wrong with our culture, and this wonderful tool i use on a daily basis is being used to exploit and mislead. have a watch.

with july coming to an end, august marks the second half of 2008.  i’m ready.  i have a vacation planned for the next half of the year.  some of my favorite holidays are coming up.  the weather will be cooling off.  the second half of the year is definitely my favorite.  i’m looking forward to having trick-or-treaters coming to my house.  i’ll have to figure out if i’m going to put gravestones in the front yard.  thanksgiving will be right around the corner too.  and as you can tell if you look at me, i love to eat good food.  then christmas.  our first christmas in our new house.  i think we may even get a real tree and put up some lights out front.

in september we will be spending some vacation time in savannah.  i haven’t been in a really long time, since i was just a small lad.  i remember hating it.  since i’ve grown up a bit, i have grown to love history and old towns.  we adventure to st. augustine occasionally and love it.  i’m really looking forward to going a bit further and seeing another old city, full of history, antiques ghost tours.  i may even eat at paula dean’s restaurant.

so yeah.  its a big second half of the year and its almost here.  are you doing anything special or looking forward to anything?

i am sitting in my smoky smelling hotel room in white’s city, new mexico. it was a very interesting experience to get here. i got to the airport this morning and met up with megan from church. who knew that i would find a friend to help pass the time. she was going to st. louis so i sat with her and had some breakfast. my initial flight left tampa, and boy did i have a winner next to me. this lady told me that she had just taken vicodin, valium, and zanex…which was a cocktail of doom for me. she kept passing out and laying her head on my shoulder. i had my mac out, watching some ufc during the flight, and she decided to get some coffee. i knew this was going to be a bad situation.

she spilled her coffee on me and my laptop. luckily i cleaned it up quickly before it seeped into my keyboard. i took this photo to capture the moment.

she then decides that it would now be a good time to cry hysterically until we arrived in houston, where she finally got off the plane. 2o minutes later, and a new cabin full of people, we departed for dallas. we arrived an hour later and sat again, while people got off and got on. from here it is a little blurry. i slept an hour and a half until we finally got to el paso, where we gathered our bags and jumped into rental cars.

i was riding shotgun in a brand new toyota camry. i’m not going to say how fast we were going, but i will say that it was 149 miles to our hotel in new mexico, and we made it in 1 hour and 15 minutes. you do the math.

so here i sit. waiting on the rest of the crew to get here so we can establish our fight plan. i’ll check back tomorrow night.

hello my friends.  the year is half over and so much has already occurred.  i bought a house, i got my dream guitar, i saw the foo fighters live, i celebrated 2 years of marriage, i’ve made some great new friends and i’ve been through 4 different states for business trips.  looking ahead throughout july i’ve noticed that my calendar doesn’t get any slower.  in fact, i may be busier now than ever.  so here’s the run down.  tomorrow night i’m going to see sister hazel in st. pete.  friday is the 4th of july, which means eating some kind of dead animal cooked over an open flame.  next week will be insane in the office since i’ll be leaving on the 13th to go to new mexico.  my company is selling an entire city, and i still haven’t figured out how it is going to work.  i’ll be gone for a whole week.  when i get back i get to play catch up at the office and at home.  then, at the end of the month, we are having some out of town company for a few days.

what i have realized is that i need a vacation.  i never knew just how precious this time was and how important it is.  i’m really stressed at work, not because of work load or anything, just because the real estate market in general is down.  i think we are going to spend a week at a cabin in georgia, for the 3rd week in september.  it couldn’t come soon enough.

i’m pretty sure july is going to fly by.  i hope it does.

last night my anniversary surprise was a trip to orlando to eat at texas de brazil.  i’ve been talking about wanting to go now for about 2 years, and my dreams finally came true.  this place was everything i ever hoped it would be.  you get to begin with the salad bar, which actually doesn’t have salad stuff on it.  from what i can remember, i got fried zucchini, grilled provolone wedges, marinated mushrooms, stuffed olives, sushi, fried eggplant, and a fresh ball of mozzarella.  once you have become content with your salad bar portion they bring you a clean plate and its time for the meat.

* note:  i’m going to be talking a lot about meat, and my wife eating meat - so get your mind out of the gutter!

when you are ready for the meat portions of your meal, you simply flip your card from the red side to the green side and all these men (wearing interesting looking pantaloons) carrying sword skewers swarm around your table and offer you things like parmesean crusted pork tenderloin, prime rib, fillet mignon, bacon wrapped fillet mignon, flank steak, chicken, sausage and other assortments of protein-y goodness.  emily ate a lot of meat.  i was proud of her.  she seems to think that she ate more than i did.  maybe she is right.

this is really hard for me to say, because i pride myself on loving to eat cows, but the desert was the best part of the whole night.  we split a piece of bananas foster pie.  it was the most dominant thing i have ever eaten.  i can’t even describe it.  it made me happier than watching all the men walk around in their pantaloons.  if you ever get the opportunity to eat at this establishment you should.  it is well worth the lofty bill.