Shoshiplatypus

This is quite a long post because I wanted to add a nice lot of things to cheer everyone up during the days of lockdown. Keep going to the end for a bit of fun!

What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?

More Digital Celtic Knots

This week I made texture overlays of the Celtic knots. A texture overlay is a monochrome image with an embossed effect added, which you incorporate into an image to add texture. A texture overlay is not an attractive image on its own, but it is used to enhance an image.

I made these from the gold Celtic knots without the shadows – I tried with the shadows and they came out really weird!

To make a texture overlay, you select a picture that you think would make an interesting texture, and in your photo editor, desaturate it (Channel Mixer/Monochrome/ then adjust sliders so that Red is approx. 75%, Green and Blue approx. 12% each, making a total of 100%); adjust Levels to increase the contrast. Then Emboss (in my photo editor this is in the Effects menu): the depth to about 15 (not too much or it looks peculiar) and the amount about 150 but move the sliders till it looks about right. You can then export the image. To use it, open a suitable image and add your texture overlay as a new layer, and in Blend Modes, select Overlay. This will incorporate your texture overlay into the base layer.

Here are a couple of examples which I have done. The first is on a leather effect background.

This is on a photo of some sample flooring that I got when we were having our kitchen done (“Limestone”).

Using texture overlays gives quite an interesting effect, I think.

Here are some examples of others which I did several years ago, overlaid onto fairly plain backgrounds. They were all made from photos I had taken. The texture overlays are all available to download from my OneDrive.

To show how you can manipulate an image to add some mood or narrative, I chose a photo I took at Tyntesfield – a magnificent Gothic Revival manor house near Bristol.

I added a nice gloomy, grungey Gothic mood to this sunny photo, by taking a free texture image I downloaded and manipulated, and converting into a texture overlay. After incorporating this into the image which I had already desaturated to greyscale and upped the contrast, I worked around the edges with the Burn tool to darken it, adding more mood. I think this manipulation gives the building a real Gothic horror movie feel to it. Maybe there’s a mad wife in that tower… definitely some bats, anyway.

I’m a bit of a texture junkie. Whenever we’re out and about, I’m always photographing interesting textures – something my mum could never understand! Most of my family thought that photos should just be of pretty views and of family and friends, but I am drawn to rusty old junk, piles of old rope and flaking paint!! Poor old Shoshi. She’s always been the weird one in the family. As Dick Francis said in one of his novels, “Some people are born weird, and some have weirdness thrust upon them.” Once you’ve got a reputation, you have to live up to it, after all.

Food

Recipe of the Week

Roasted Sweet Potato Salad

This has to be one of the most delicious recipes I’ve made to date! It was a corker. It was also extremely easy to make, and made more quickly with a bit of advance preparation. Both my hubby and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I used brown rice, not having any wild, and I took one of my pre-cooked packs from the freezer. I always cook a pound of raw brown rice at a time in a large pot, and freeze it in portions for us to have with curries etc. Cooking brown rice takes a lot longer than white (about 20 minutes) and this is a great time and energy saver. All you need to do is put the frozen rice in a sieve and pour boiling water through it and you’re done.

I also cooked the sweet potato in advance, while I had the oven on for something else – I put the cooked sweet potato in a container in the fridge where it keeps quite safely for a number of days.

I didn’t have pecans, so I used hazelnuts instead. I dry roasted these in a heavy frying pan on the hob – over medium-high heat with frequent stirring, I find this easier to control than roasting them in the oven.

The combination of the sweetness of the sweet potatoes, raisins and apples and the delicious flavour of the roasted nuts, with the piquancy of the dressing, was a winner. I served the salad with chopped green salad leaves and scattered a few chopped cherry tomatoes on top. I intend making this dressing to accompany other salads as well. Both sweet and sour, with the white wine vinegar and raisins, and enriched with the tahini.

With the brown rice and sweet potatoes, rich in protein and unrefined carbohydrate, this was a sustaining meal which staved off the hunger pangs for many hours! Satiety and low calorie density are the watchwords with whole-food plant-based eating, and with the right combination of ingredients, tasty and delicious to boot! Highly recommended. My weight only fluctuates by a pound or two, week by week, and I’m in the middle of the ideal BMI range for my weight and height.

We had another treat in the evening – I made some pancakes with almond pulp and almond milk, with some wholemeal flour, and flavoured them with cinnamon and vanilla. I served them with sliced banana and a drizzle of maple syrup. Mmmm.

After my hubby came home with the week’s grocery shopping and I was washing the fruit and veg, I thought how pretty and colourful the lemons and tomatoes were! I had to take a photo. There is art in this!

As promised last week, I also made some more oatcakes, this time with just the chia seeds for binding. I made them slightly thicker than the seeded ones. On balance I think I prefer the seeded ones. My hubby said I could make a fortune selling both kinds! I don’t think so, but I was flattered nonetheless, and very happy that he enjoyed them so much. I also had to make some more of the seeded ones because they disappear like hot (oat)cakes! I use medium oatmeal rather than grinding rolled oats, but I might try the latter one day for a change; they will probably have a softer, less crunchy and gritty texture. Oatcakes are really easy to make, and with this recipe they are fat free, and very healthy and nutritious. That’s the sort of snack I like!

My hubby’s Slimming World meetings are now taking place on Zoom for the duration. He’s now had a couple of good sessions this way. It’s great because the members of the group can still encourage one another and be accountable to each other, and the leader has real-time face-to-face contact. I am continuing to keep his meal record up to date and it makes life a great deal easier, with him being at home all the time, and eating exclusively what I am making.

Kitties

The wool box has continued to be the preferred sleeping place. I was highly amused last week when Shaz (Silverwolf) commented on my blog last week, that her mum’s cat decided to have her kittens in her knitting wool box and she wasn’t too impressed! I’m not surprised. Birthing kittens is a somewhat messy business. Not that there’s any danger of our two doing that because they’ve both had their squeaks removed, as my hubby puts it!

This last one has to be my favourite, taken last night. In fact, I think it may be one of my absolute favourites of all the photos I’ve taken of them.

If that’s not love, I’d like to know what it is!

We’ve decided that Lily is a lazy lump. Ruby does all the work, washing both herself and her sister. They were out in the garden the other day, playing with my hubby. He got out the birdie toy (a long fishing-rod with a feather toy attached with a long string) and he said Ruby was leaping up in the air after it and having a fine old time, while Lily just rolled on her back and waved her paws at it.

A few days before that, Ruby was in a state of heightened excitement because she’d caught a mouse. A very, very small mouse.

Yesterday, out in the garden. Lily playing with the waterfall, with Ruby looking on intently.

Our Garden

The garden is looking lovely at the moment with the daffodils and primroses. The primrose bank looks even prettier than it did a couple of weeks ago.

Around the corner of the bank, beside the steps, little wild violets grow where it’s more shady. They have started coming out now. I have always loved these delicate little wild flowers.

I took a photo from the bedroom window. Although not much is out apart from the daffodils and primroses, I think my hubby has made it all look very nice and neat. He’s moved the little bench from outside the kitchen window (no longer room for it there, with the larger herb garden), and although it’s a bit broken, it looks pretty on the lawn. He says that the water feature in the centre of the lawn is leaking and needs repairing, and he’s also in the process of mending the sundial which blew off and broke in the recent storms we had. You can see the empty pedestal. Some of these jobs may have to wait till he can go shopping again for such things, unless he gets what he needs online.

It’s not an enormous garden but it’s very private considering we are surrounded by houses, and it is now kitty proof. They seem quite happy pottering around and playing within its confines! We are hoping to have a climbing rose on the pergola over the steps eventually. You can see our little apple tree in the corner of the lawn, complete with its collar to stop the kitties climbing it and escaping! Last year it was tremendously productive – gorgeous sweet, flavoursome apples which I prefer cooked, although my hubby likes them raw, too. We don’t know what variety they are. We love our little garden and often have our meals at the table in front of the summer house in the summer – it is partially shaded by the apple tree and we have a view right down the garden to the house.

Making the most of the lockdown

Both kitties have been very pleased to see so much more of my hubby throughout the day, during the lockdown period. He’s normally out a lot, gadding about here, there and everywhere, and half the time I haven’t a clue where he is! It’s so nice to have him at home all the time at the moment. He’s taking advantage of the nice weather to work in the garden, and to play in his man cave.

Last Saturday, I spent all afternoon and the first part of the evening trying to sort out various tech problems he was having. For some reason his new (2nd hand) smart phone had stopped working. I told him I didn’t know anything about fixing phones, especially Android ones – I have a reconditioned iPhone – but I said I’d have a look at it. He recently went on Smarty on my recommendation (much cheaper than the contract he’d been on before with his old phone) and for the past few days he seemed to have lost his connection. In the end I suggested he took the SIM card out and put it back again, and this sorted the problem!! The family wants him to go on WhatsApp (I’m on it already) so I said I’d set that up for him as well. I also set up his Google and Amazon accounts on it. If we are all on WhatsApp we can have video contact during this time when we can’t get together physically. I had a good laugh at his choice of passwords, based on some very strange logic haha!

The other problem he had was ongoing – with his Kindle. I gave him this basic Kindle several years ago and he’s never been able to put books on it. I’d bought a disc with hundreds of books on it and I’d put a lot of those on, but he’s never linked it with Amazon. I have explained to him about 5 times now (with written instructions too) how to connect the Kindle to the laptop and drag and drop books across but he’s never mastered it, and has always lost the instructions I wrote out for him! So I wrote it out again with him beside me and did it step by step. I told him if he lost these instructions and ever said to me again that he didn’t know how to do it, I’d crown ‘im!! I told him that this period of enforced incarceration at home was a golden opportunity for him to sit down and really get to grips with his computer and learn to use it properly. He’s always made the excuse that he hasn’t got time, but the truth of the matter is that he isn’t really interested and would rather do something else and hope that if he has any problems, I will sort them out!!! However, I would also rather be doing something else than THAT.

This was preceded by many hours of failing to connect the Kindle to the computer at all. We tried two different cables, and also tried to connect it to my laptop, all to no avail. Eventually I brought my Kindle down and it connected to both laptops with no problem – with a really nice braided USB cable. (I always buy braided cables now because they are much more durable.) We tried his Kindle with that cable and it worked a treat, and he’s going to order his own. He’s now got lots more books available to read, and is enjoying the time during the lockdown to do some more reading.

This has spurred me on and reminded me about my own Kindle, which I haven’t used for ages. I’ve now put some different books on it, and am doing some more reading myself.

Half a day very well spent! As a result, we didn’t get our pancake supper until 9.30 p.m.

Something to keep the ole’ brain workin’ during the lockdown

At our church, since the services have been cancelled, emails have been going back and forth (one really fun person seems to be in charge of this!) to encourage us and keep us all amused. Yesterday he sent this email to everybody:

“Hi guys
Just be careful because people are going crazy from being in lock down! Actually I’ve just been talking about this with the microwave and toaster while drinking coffee and all of us agreed that things are getting hot. I didn’t mention anything to the washing machine as she puts a different spin on everything  and certainly not to the fridge as he is acting cold and distant. In the end the iron calmed me down as she said everything will be fine no situation is too pressing….. ”

On Sunday my hubby uploaded this. See how you get on!

The other day I came across this YouTube video that had me in stitches:

Keep safe and well, everybody, and above all, keep smiling. We’ll get through this eventually!