Heading West

Something they asked me to create for work. For all the Photoshop geeks, I used displacement mapping to get the logo "onto" the covered wagon. When I came into work that day, they asked me if I had a picture of a covered wagon... oddly enough, I did. I took this shot last year when I was in Elgin.

Continuing in the same down-home-America theme, I've also included some artwork I just finished for my Illustrator class. It's a recreation of a WPA poster created in the 1930's. Here is the original poster, followed by mine. Drawing the teepees and Native American took the longest.

Woman Struck Down by Bursitis!

So I started running again today in preparation for a Zoo Run Run (try not to get the song stuck in your head). Rev and I ran to the local Home Depot to make copies of a key (I lost all my keys yesterday). ... I just looked it up and it was a little over 4 miles round trip. Don't worry it only took us almost exactly 3 hours.

What's that, you say? 4 miles in 3 hours?!

Well, let me add:

We ran down a major street, had to stop at 2 major stoplights and wait for large volumes of traffic,
We stopped for some groceries,
We stopped at Home Depot for the aforementioned key-copying services
And we stopped at the local Academy (Sports and Outdoors - The right stuff, the right price!) to buy Rev some new shoes (which are pretty awesome),
Oh and we stopped to climb a wall.

So all of that took 1.5 hours, easily, clocking my 4 mile walk/run in at 25 mins/mile. Not too bad considering:

There were 20 MPH winds blowing into us on the way out,
I was pushing over 40 lbs of stuff in front of me (Child in stroller + groceries),

Oh, and I almost forgot: not bad considering I just gave myself a nasty case of Trochanteric Bursitis (you can read more about it here) on the run back home, and now I can scarcely walk or move my legs without causing severe pain to my hips! So for the rest of the week, I have to work on lowering my time as well as resting and letting my body heal. Tomorrow I will have to bike, since the pain is pretty bad right now.

Funny unrelated story. Lately, when Rev gets upset at something I do to him accidently ("Mommy, [yelling and crying at the same time] i told you not to move my shoes right there! [large tears falling, and still yelling] Don't move my shoes right there, I told you!"), I've started saying "I'm sorry Rev. Can you forgive me?" and he always says yes. It seems to calm him down. Well today, I was crouched underneath a cabinet and when i got up, Ihit my head really hard on a cabinet door that was open. It hurt with such intensity that I was on the verge of tears, probably also because my hips were crippling under my weight from the aforementioned 3 hour exercise. Well, Rev has a bad habit of laughing at me whenever I hurt myself instead of saying 'Are you ok, mommy' like sweet boys are supposed to do. So, in my pain, I was preparing myself for his laughter and already getting ready to scold him when he says, you guessed it,

"Mommy, did you hurt yourself? Can you... [he pauses looking for the right words; and in a sincere voice asks]Can you just forgive yourself?" Hah! I couldn't help but laugh.

Little People

Image Title: "Just hear me out, man!"

I mentioned a composite image in my last post, and this is it. A big person and a little person, trying to get along. This was part of a project for one of my classes, where we used our "Photo-chop" skills.

And now, the breakdown. To create that composite image, I compiled these three seperate photos. I hope I haven't taken all the magic out of it for you.