Helen and Bill are about to go on holiday. They have a surfeit of sausages left over from the barbecue on 14th. Ron had done his usual grand job with the charcoal, the smoke, and the bottle of beer he used to dowse the flames when they looked like singeing too much. But there had been a certain miscalculation on the catering front. We were to become beneficiaries of this, and to that end we went over to Poulner to collect them. Helen, incidentally, has produced a beautiful picture of a gardener in his element; her first effort in acrylics. I hope she is justifiably proud of it. I would have been.
Whilst we were in the vicinity we had a look at the outside of a very promising house in Fairlie; then on to Gravel Lane in Ringwood to one that was not quite so attractive. We will keep Marshwood in Fairlie in our favourites box, but delete the other which is rather surrounded by more recent housing in a lane that seems too narrow for its traffic.
This afternoon I had a doze and found several other ways of avoiding getting down to a task I have been putting off. On 28th June I wrote of the preparation of some 37 year old colour slides for printing for The Firs August Open Studio. I was rash enough to say I would print them the next day. Well I hadn’t got around to it until today. This is because I was trying something I hadn’t quite done before. Danni, the Exhibition administrator, e-mailed the several exhibitors a few days ago for confirmation of what they intended to submit. This acted as a necessary prompt.
I had made many prints up to A3+ size when in Sutherland place and previous addresses. I had had tuition in Photoshop from Alex Schneideman. I had a Canon Pro 900 printer. I had an Epson V750 PRO scanner. And I had a six year old i-Mac too old – a veteran at five and obsolete next year – for upgrading. So I now have a brand new i-Mac and have to synchronise it with familiar equipment each time I engage in something for the first time. This is scary.
Well, there was no more prevarication possible.
So I rigged everything up and went to work. Of course the printer had run out of Cyan ink, hadn’t it? No problem. I have spares and remembered what to do. The i-Photo application then invited me to customise the print. What was that? I didn’t know, so I pressed ‘customise’, and merrily began. It took three sheets of wasted photographic A4 paper for me to realise why I was only printing 3/4 of the picture and with strange borders. If you opted to customise you got several icons at the bottom of the screen, inviting various borders and captions to the picture. I hadn’t noticed those. Also for some reason, whatever you see on screen, the paper has to be loaded vertically and I was loading it horizontally. It may always have been like that, but, not having done any printing for three years, I may well have forgotten.
The next print was a slight improvement. Having declined to write anything underneath the photograph, because I’d much rather do that in pencil on the frame’s border, I still had a space left beneath the finished picture which was intended to take whatever I chose to write in my choice of font and font size. Once I’d chosen to customise I didn’t know how to cancel it. I managed that in the end, but I can’t remember how. Even The IT Crowd’s most sensible advice to turn it off and start again didn’t work because whenever I tried to recommence my equipment picked up where we’d left off. In certain circumstances I’m sure that would be a life-saver, but it didn’t fit the bill this afternoon.
Customise is no longer going to be pressed.
Nevertheless, supplemented by some shots of The Cuff Billet New Europa Jazz Band taken on 5th May this year, the results are far better than I could possibly have expected. It is just really a matter of being a computerphobe. Nothing in reality is ever as bad as we fear. But that is the point of a phobia. You can’t tell yourself that and make it go away.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s chilli con carne (recipe) and pilau rice with the addition of crisp courgettes (courtesy of Heather and Brian) fried with mushrooms. I finished the Chilano.