Who Wants a Picture of Dirty Dishes?

April 15, 2012

How realistic do you like your paintings to be?

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Last September, as I was getting ready for our trip to Europe, I wrote a post called “Viewing Time as an Ocean.”  In it I quoted Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times who said that  “evergreen is journalist lingo for a topic that, like its namesake, is always in season (or, at least, one that won’t go stale immediately).”

In that post I said I wanted to schedule a number of such posts to be published while I was gone. Then I would get back to writing fresh posts.

However, as you may know if you read the first post after I got back — “It Was The Best of Vacations, It Was the Worst of Vacations” — I was out of commission for quite a few months. Now I am back to creating more “evergreens” while I focus on two long-neglected jobs: getting my contact list brought up to date and getting my computer organized.

In the former situation I have hundreds of people I need to keep track of and have not. In the latter, I have tens of thousands (well, thousands anyway) of computer files I can’t find. Why? Because I do what you probably do: When I first save a file I give it a name that makes sense to me at that moment. A couple months  or years later, I haven’t the foggiest idea what I was thinking. Consequently, I have had to spend far too much time searching, which isn’t fun. Even worse, sometimes a file is lost forever.

So to get those two jobs done and still provide new material for the blog, I’m putting together some evergreen posts that will be scheduled for two or three times a week while I’m doing my nitty-gritty chores. There are several topics that won’t take too long to pull together (or so I hope) and should still be interesting to my readers (some of them, anyway).

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This evergreen post comes from Hyper Realistic Paintings That Look Like Photos, which was sent to me by my brother. This page of 26 drawings on the Bored Panda website, many in the class of Andy Warhol Campbell soup cans, are as good as photos. But as my sister pointed out, why would someone want a beautifully rendered picture of a sink full of dishes? Evidence for divorce?

Yet if you look carefully you’ll notice that the pans and dishes stacked in the sink don’t have any food stuck on them. They already are cleaned, so why aren’t they turned over and draining instead of sitting in the sink with water running on them?

How do these “photorealists” do it? Do they take a picture and then paint over it?

Anyway, the picture below is one of the pictures that caught my eye because it looks almost exactly like a picture I took on the coast in South Carolina. I would have also included my picture to show you the comparison — but I couldn’t find it in the computer!

Time to write a few more evergreens for the next few weeks while I organize my lists of names and my files.

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If you missed it, don’t forget to read A Book for a Blooper. It is an offer to give you a book if you find a mistake in the newly revamped Support4Change website.

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A Book for a Blooper

April 4, 2012

Search for mistakes in the new Support4Change website and receive a book if you are one of the first five people to let me know where the errors are. 

How many times have you read a book by a respected author and discovered a spelling error? It isn’t surprising, because it is much too easy to overlook an error you can’t see because you are too close to it. Self-published book are the most likely to have errors. But even when not self-published (I have a publisher), the gremlins of bloopers, blunders, and foul-ups slip in unnoticed until the print is dry.

So today I am writing a brief post to introduce you to the revised Support4Change website and give you a chance to help me tidy up the spelling, grammar and links over there, on the website. I’ve been at this for eight months and I know there are mistakes I’ve overlooked. Of course, there may be mistakes here on the blog, but I am specially asking for help on the website.

Of course, I do have an ulterior motive for offering a print book for your sleuthing: I hope that when you see more of the site, you will find it so superior to the previous one that you will tell your friends.

The book I will give you is Ask Yourself Questions and Change Your Life, a component of the Set Goals With Confidence Program. Click on the title to read more about it. Use the comment section below, or the Contact Us form on the website.

Of course, I would love to hear glowing comments from you about the new format (honest, of course) as well as comments about mistakes you’ve found.

I expect to begin writing posts on a regular basis very soon. So come back to see what’s next.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Pardon Our Dust

I Have Returned . . . Have You?

March 19, 2012

Explore the new Support4Change format and win a book if you find a blooper.

Earlier today I finished this post and when I went to check it out, it disappeared. Maybe I accidentally hit the “move to trash” button when I meant to say “publish.” So I am writing this again and hopefully will do it correctly this time.

If you have been coming back to the blog since last October, which is the last time I wrote a post, you are certainly a loyal reader. And now you are rewarded with a genuinely new post.

I had written a letter to my family this morning to tell them about the completion of the new Support4Change website and since I said everything there that I wanted to write to you, I decided to send you the same message. Here it is:

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Dear Family and Friends,

It’s Monday morning and I am getting ready to leave tomorrow for a conference in Washington, DC, which always includes a visit to Rebecca and family. However, I want to take a few minutes to tell you that I have finally (after many months) completed the transition from the old Support4Change format to the new one.

Here is what I am talking about:

http://www.support4change.com

Previously, as I may have told you earlier, I was using a static site in which the content of each page was set when the page was uploaded. For that I used Dreamweaver. The new dynamic method uses Joomla and each page is “created” on the fly, so to speak, with various components coming together when you request a specific topic. Hard to explain, but look at something like MSNBC and you’ll see what I mean, for each time you refresh the page you’ll get a slightly different look.

Okay, I’m not that sophisticated yet (nor ever intend to be), but the learning curve has been outrageous and now I am very pleased with the new look of the site. Have reduced the number of pages considerably and made the navigation system easier to operate.

Best of all, I am finally learning how to create sales pages that should be more effective than the ones I’ve been using. Apparently there is a science to how to write a sales page and I’m trying to do my best to be scientific. Statistics will tell. Since I only put the site up last Thursday, there hasn’t been enough time to test it. But I have my fingers crossed. In case you’re interested, one way you can get to these pages is through the STORE link at the bottom of the pages or on the left under General Information.

By the way, I am offering to send a print copy of my second book, Ask Yourself Questions and Change Your Life, to the first five people who find an error on the site (there surely are many more than that) and tell me where they found it.

As anyone knows who does much writing, you can read and read and read your own work and later discover you only THOUGHT you wrote what you intended to write. And of course, it is easy to have broken links even when you’ve tried to test them yourself.

Bob and I were planning to go to San Diego for the weekend to celebrate the completion of this extremely long project, but it rained and rained and rained. So we stayed home and he took me to a fancy restaurant to celebrate on Friday and I spent a very relaxing weekend doing whatever I felt like doing, which was mostly getting my Kindle and iPod straightened out so I will have entertainment for a couple months.

Hope spring is beginning to look pleasant wherever you are. (Apparently I am going to be in DC when the cherry blossoms are in high bloom. Usually miss that when I go to the spring conference, but this year, as everyone knows, the warm weather is not usual.

If you want to send any comments about the revised site, I would appreciate it. Or even more, if you like it and tell someone else about it, please do.

Much love,

Arlene

It Was the Best of Vacations, It Was the Worst of Vacations

October 12, 2011

Best-laid plans often go astray and are most unwelcome when they happen on vacation.

Here is a brief synopsis of our September trip to France and England.

What we expected to see in France and on a river boat through six locks on the Seine: