We recently found out what breed of cat Shadow is:

She's a Russian Blue and this description explains a lot about her:

"The Russian Blue is a cat breed that has a silver-blue coat. These cats are known to be highly intelligent and playful but tend to be timid around strangers. They also develop close bonds with their human companions and are highly sought after due to their personalities and unique coat."

As many of you know, Shadow often comes running up to us when we step outside.  She goes with us when we walk the trails or go to the mail box.  She loves to stay with me when I work in the greenhouse and she just has a very fetching personality.  We didn't really want another outside cat but quickly learned - when Shadow decided that she was going to live here - that she wasn't your ordinary cat..

World Famous Wildernest Zipline

This is Brian and the water in the background is the English Channel - and on this day it's a cold and blustery part of the North Atlantic between England and Europe. And what does that bumper sticker say? 

Merry Christmas!

This is special!

Perhaps you thought that all of my excitement about the little town of Winnsboro was just the raving of an old guy - but take a look at this list! It's a list of state cultural districts as designated by the Texas Commission of the Arts.  All of them!  And you see the names of all the big cities in Texas on the list - but down at the bottom is the little town of Winnsboro.  The ONLY rural Cultural District in Texas!  Pretty special!  Almost half of them are listed as having "website coming soon" - but not Winnsboro.  Here's their site.

More Photo Elements 9 - This time PhotoMerge Group

In this exercise I'm saying that the picture on the right is the best picture except for Lizzie - in the picture on the left she looks a lot better!

So I marked Lizzie on the left picture and Elements moved that image to the picture on the right and also did a lot of editing to merge it in properly - making change' to Julies leg and Kevin's leg also.

When you call up the pictures Elements uses behind the scenes logic to sync the images and that's why the display of the picture on the right has a white space above it. It's pretty amazing when you view the changes with a mouse click.

Seeker of the Fleece!

So - whose lap does Pancho chose to lie on?  The one with the fleece throw on it.  (Can be empirically proven.)

Wood County Master Gardener 2012 Spring Conference

This is another Photo Elements 9 project that turned out OK.  I think this will be the final version of the poster that we will use to advertise our conference in March!  It pays to have the right tools!

Christmas Sharing

Hospitality House Christmas Party! 

A young little girl to Jack: "Do you go by Jack so no one will no you are Santa?"
Jack: "Yes, how did you know?". :)

This is a post from Jack's wife Linda on FB.  That's Jack with the little girl in the picture.  The beard really belongs to Jack and it's there all of the time.  But Jack has a lot of Santa on the inside too.  (And he writes, sings, and plays the guitar too - really well!  He played at the Wildernest Treehouse JamFest!)

More Photo Elements 9

I've been playing with several things in Photo Elements 9 today - skipping the watching of tutorials and just playing with stuff using the limited amount of knowledge I've picked up in the last couple days.  These two are different treatments of a photo on the Cibo Vino Restaurant website.  I like both of them.  (BTW - take a look at the right column on my blog further down where I've added a few links to some of our favorite places here in Winnsboro.)  My main project is the poster for the next music event here but I can't post that because it has several things on it that are just in the wishing stages right now.

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More learning Photo Elements 9

I watched over 20 of the on-line tutorials today from the most basic to a few of the easier kinda neat things.  Here are a couple tests of the "Out of bounds" feature. I'm definitely missing an important piece of this!  There's a keyboard command to turn it on but it turns something else on when I do it! I guess that means some Google time is in order?

November 2011

I like to look through my pictures at the end of a month to see what we've been doing with our time.  Of course there are some posts from November below this one but here are a few more pictures with some captions:  It was a pretty busy month!

Worked on our Wood County Master Gardeners Spring Conference arranging a speaker, acquiring a raffle prize, and worked on poster ideas.

Created the "Scrapbook Song" DVD for Alex

Found a picture of grandson Colby on FB.  He lives with his father. (Starnes)

Spent a morning traveling around Wood County taking pictures of fall color - but this one is in the back yard.

Had tree removal done at the house and tree trimming done at the Treehouse

Did some refinish work in the chapel and we replaced the cross with one more appropriate.

Spent an hour or so one morning taking fog pictures.  This one is almost the same place as the 'fall color' picture above.

Attended the Winnsboro Fine Art Market

Found a picture of granddaughter Haley on FB.  She too lives with her father. (Gattis)

Had the JamFest T-shirts made and have sold most of them now.

The sign for the city of Quitman is going in.  I worked on the project.

Attended two afternoons of music at the Winnsboro Fine Arts Market.

We are adding some stone pathways at the Wood County Master Gardener's Wildscape Garden at the Mineola Nature Preserve.

A cold Christmas season night in downtown Winnsboro!

Attended several music evenings at Brewbaker's Restaurant and Pub.

I completely rebuilt the upper pond - removing the stone, cleaning and repairing the liner, dug  it deeper but made it smaller, and replaced the stone, pump, filter, and waterfall.

And, of course,there was Thanksgiving and the week of prep that goes into it.

Another Reyes record

At three years, five months, and eleven days - Xander is the youngest to solo on the Zipline! He was pretty cool with it but when we took him off at the bottom he didn't know how to get back to the Treehouse so we did it hand-in-hand!

Is it time yet?

So the joke was - during the time of building the East Bridge, the Treehouse, the Zipline, the Chapel, the Sky Bridge, the West Bridge and Zip Line - that all we needed now was a Gift Shop. I guess my question is - Is it time yet? We've got Wildernest hiking sticks and canes, Wildernest hiking stick medallions, "I rode the Wildernest Zipline" bumper stickers, Wildernest T-shirts, Wildernest Treehouse Jamfest T-shirts, Wildernest Treehouse Jamfest Photo Books, and assorted Wildernest DVD's ("Building the Treehouse", several Thanksgiving DVD's, several special Treehouse and Zipline events. I guess we could get some coffee mugs made too. So what do you think?

Just finished "Cross Fire"

Just finished reading "Cross Fire" the last in the Alex Cross series of books by James Patterson. I believe that there were 17 of them. All were good reads and fast reads and entertaining reads. My only complaint is that he found it necessary to have the murders in each novel committed in a more grisly manner than the previous. In the one before this one he had to resort to a method made famous in the movie "Fargo". It can't get any worse so he had to stop I suppose. This last book was a wrap-up that finally did away with the menace that tracked him through many of the books.

I'll probably go now to another series of books that Patterson has written, The Women's Murder Club. There are ten in this series with the eleventh due out in next May.

Another weekend at Crossroads Music Co. & Listening Room!

Here Comes the Sun. Listen to this and compare it to the Beatles sound! And look at the smiles - they're having a good time playing this!

Dave Walser and Brian Magnus on cello.   We saw these guys at Crossroads last night and it was a unique experience.  Dave Walser was a member of Beatlegras, a trio that played mostly Beatle music and they did a great job - and Dave voice was a big part of that.  We were all singing along last night especially with the encore - "Hey Jude"!  In addition to Beatles music he also did some Bob Dylan, some James Taylor, and a couple of his own songs.  Wonderfully enjoyable evening!  We liked every song!  Brian is a freelance cellist and cello teacher.  He also plays with Heather McCready (which I've posted about before - another Crossroads favorite) and with the Allen Philharmonic. (Another parenthetical - the other two members of Beatlegras, Milo Deering and George Anderson also play with Heather.)

The night before we heard Druha Trava, from the Czech Republic. These guys make it to Crossroads every year and I've wanted to check them out the last two times they were and we finally did it this year. They've been touring the US for six weeks and played in Wichita, Kansas the night after they played here. You may have seen my FB post - in the Czech Republic they have only one top music list (not one for each genre) and Druha Trava has been number one on that list this year.

I don't know how Gus continues to bring in these quality musicians to play at the modest venue of Crossroads Music Co. and Listening Room. I think it must be something like the Wildernest Treehouse Jamfest. It's just a neat place to play and the finances sorta take a back seat. (Speaking of seats, we've been fortunate enough to get good ones for these two shows and the photos here were taken from our seats.)

It's unusual to have two shows on one weekend but it happened this weekend. Nothing more now until the Saturday after Thanksgiving when they'll have the sixth anniversary show!