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General myJanee.com News My Day Photoshop Travel Tales

More Travel Tales Uploaded

I’ve been working for a few days on updating Travel Tales, the travel section of my site. This section can always be found beginning either with myJanee.com or that menu at the top right > All Things Janee > Travel Tales.

What I’ve been working on is skeleton pages for 2014-20 and a start on 2019’s page. So far, none of my photos are attached to their bigger version, so content yourself with the thumbnails.

It’s been lots of fun to go through the photos and the accompanying memories. Here are just a few from the Travel Tales 2019:

at the North Dakota Capitol in Bismark
North Dakota
East College, DePauw University
Indiana
Falls of the Ohio State Park, Indiana
Indiana
Artichokes
Texas
Tower at the WWI Museum in Kansas City, MO
Missouri

In Photoshop news, I sent the “Feathers” triptych off to CanvasPop. We’ll see how they turn out, but they have good reviews, right out of the gate. Here’s my final result.

We are making real headway on our new TV room. I’m surprised at how much I like it, and how much more useful that space is, using it as our “family” room rather than a dining room.

What I did was to move the dining room to the middle section, the TV to the left section, and the living room to the right section of the great room. Great rooms are great, to be sure, but they do need to have sensible arranging. I’m learning new things!

Someday I want to compile pics of the various rooms I’ve designed and arranged and post them.

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My Day

Practicing Search Engine Optimization

Today, I’m practicing Search Engine Optimization. My instructors are my gurus at WPBeginners. In particular, this page. So far, I’ve gotten as far as Welcome to the Google Search Console, and I have to wait till tomorrow for my site to do its thing.

My Yoast plug-in for SEO is telling me now that my SEO is not good. So, yay! Room for improvement! And remember that here I’m practicing Search Engine Optimization.

This is from my Gradations collection in my Gallery. It reminds me of the road I'm on as I'm practicing search engine optimization.

Back in the day, we didn’t have to do SEO. I made a good site with lots of great information and useful links and people found me. Over the many years, things have <gasp> changed!

So, now that I have good and plentiful website content, like my Tutorials page and my Galleries, I am ready for people to find me again.

And I’ve dreamed up another angle for me: Photoshop Hobbyists! I’m not a teach-to-the-test sort of instructor, so training for the Adobe Certified Expert test is not my realm. I have never aspired to train Photoshop professionals, although I’ve gotten a few of them started on their way. But I’m really targeting hobbyists.

It’s not about the age of the student; it’s more about the goals. I’m not as into Color Management as I am into color correction or into colorizing a grayscale photo. And, while I love creating graphics with Photoshop, if a student wants to know about how to present said graphics to an offset printer, I would leave that investigation to the student.

I’m still working out in my mind how to implement Art Challenges into my site. I want a way to attract new visitors to the site, new people who will want to get better in Photoshop, but I don’t know that I want the Challenge to be huge. If I did a huge thing like on Facebook, I’d attract many people, but would it get too unwieldy? I don’t want an un-Janee-like atmosphere. So still working on that.

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My Day Photoshop

Strutting my stuff

Argh. Yeah. I’m not used to keeping my vehicles long enough to have stuff go wrong with them. And I’m used to having Hondas, which, in my experience, just don’t have much go wrong. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vexing noise in the back of my car was bad struts! That plus some brake work set me back $600.

And the RV is getting fixed, finally! My little altercation with the stop sign is costing the insurance company $30,000. I know, right? I’m really going to try hard not to do anything like that again. Lesson learned!

The TV room project turned into a bit longer one than we’d hoped for. We got the rug and the pad in and waited till Tuesday to put them in, because we had to move the furniture and clean and that was an empty day. So, furniture moved, we opened the pad and put it down. Cool.

Then we opened the rug. Buzzz! Wrong rug! Very wrong rug. The woman at Wayfair was very nice and assured us that we would have our right rug in around the end of the month. Urf. So we had to move the furniture all back onto our old rug.

The bright-colored abstract rug is now in the office and I like it here.

I’ve done a little art, but just a little. Here’s a look at my sketchpad:

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My Day Photoshop

Having Fun Making Art

My client wanted a triptych work done with maybe feathers, blues, and grays. Graphic art rather than photorealism. And here’s what I came up with. Client loves it and so do I!

If you’re curious about the spiritual meaning of a blue jay feather, Symbolshub has your answer.

In other news, we’re coming closer to having our lighting done in our TV room — that side of our great room where the TV lives. When we have it done, I’ll post a picture here.

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General myJanee.com News Janee's Galleries My Day Travel Tales

Many miles traveled; Milestone Reached!

Yeah! I’ve gotten as far as I can get with the State Capitol project for now. All of the states for which I have photos are posted. There are still two states for which Jack has photos and I do not — Indiana and Wisconsin, since I accidentally formatted my card before getting the pix off. (Bad idea. Don’t do that.)

And there are still 8 states for which we have not been to the capitol. I hope you will go there and look at my pics and that you like one or two of them! I still can’t believe how much work I’ve gotten done through this spring and summer.

Now I can get into some less mundane work. I know, what could possibly be more exciting than editing 1500 or so pictures and getting them saved for the web and posted on each of these 42 pages, right?

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

Some new states, goals and some adulting

Today I posted the pics for North Carolina and Oklahoma — pics I shot in 2010 and 2011. I’m so PROUD of myself for finally, after all of this time, getting these pics into the light of day.

This website revival has been such an epic task and I really didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to discipline myself enough to a) learn the technology and b) just knuckle down and do it all. So yay, me!

I still have goals, even after the States are all posted. I now have a web cam and a mic and headset, so I can set out to learn how to do video tutorials. So many people are vlogging; how hard can it be? I do know that I need to get a haircut before I put myself on camera.

I was trying to get caught up today, because I’ve been off doing adult stuff. Two check-up doctors’ appointments, the dentist, the dog groomer, laundry, yeah, adult stuff all!

Here’s Jodie after her drastic grooming. I’m really loving this cut! We’ll let her topknot grow out a bit, after her puppy hair is all gone, but yeah. Loving this.

Poodle Nose!
Jodie after the drastic grooming
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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

North Dakota and New Mexico added!

Our country is so beautiful and there’s so much art and architecture to see. Today I worked on New Mexico and North Dakota, getting their capitol pages both published. Go look at all of these. I have some nice pics in there.

Here are a couple. The white flowers are ones I spied in Santa Fe. The Great Seal is in Bismark, North Dakota.

It just occurs to me that I put New Mexico’s capital city as Albuquerque. I will go and change that.

So I mentioned that Jodie had a haircut. Here she is! The poodle people in my group all say that poodles shed their puppy coat about this age (10-11 months) and then it just mats.

So she’s happier now, and so am I! And her topknot will grow out. I’m going to keep it far shorter than the 3.5″ she had been sporting. Ugh.

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

All of the M states are posted!

Well, with the exception of Maryland, whose capitol we have not visited yet. We should have done it last summer, but then my pictures would have not been here anyway, since they would be lost along with that camera. <sigh>

Anyway, today I posted Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada. This leaves me with just 9 states for which I have photos to post. There are still 8 states in which we need to visit statehouses. Hawaii is one of them and I do not envision myself getting onto a plane anytime soon.

So I’m starting to look forward to the next project.

Jodie got groomed yesterday! This was a big deal, because she’s been losing puppy down and it mats like crazy. I opted for sanity over vanity for this groom, so she’s sort of stupidly short right now, but we are getting to know the new Jodie. I had been trying to keep the mats under control, but it was a losing battle.

The people at the grooming salon assured me that I was not a bad poodle mom, but that the puppy hair is just impossible to keep long, as her topknot was. So, after struggling with those topknot mats for over 8 weeks, I feel so relieved now. I love this dog so much!

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General myJanee.com News Travel Tales

So Much Amazing Art!

That’s what I’m seeing when I review, edit, and post my State Capitol pictures!

This piece of carving was at the Capitol in Lansing, Michigan. Each of the capitols has interesting architecture, beautiful artwork, and sometimes quite over-the-top gilding. But it’s all fun to photograph. I do hope that someday someone will look at these.

We’re still pondering what to do with our lighting in our media room, which is actually just the part of our great room where we watch tv. My original shelf concept was nixed because it conflicts with the height of our arched doorway.

I know, why do we even HAVE an arched doorway? Historical value. I want the archaeologists of the future to have a time with it. They will certainly think that it has some religious significance.

So now I’m thinking about a shelf that stops short of the arched doorway enough that it doesn’t call attention to the doorway, but rather is an architectural feature in its own right.

Someday, when all of this industrial stuff is hopelessly out of style and only old people have it, well.. I’ll be old. And I’ll love it just like today’s old people like the rounded oak furniture of the 80’s.

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

More State Capitols Uploaded! Crowds in Awe!

Yes! Check out my Our United States link to see all the progress I’ve made. AFAICT, I have just 18 more states for which I have pictures to post. My latest additions are Illinois, Tennessee, and Rhode Island.

Getting going on a bit of art. Some’s on the computer and some is still in my head.

We’re working more on ideas for our media room lighting. Every time I come up with an idea and bounce it off Jack, he thinks that I’m changing my mind. I have difficulty explaining that I’m developing a plan and formulating ideas, that it doesn’t always just pop out as a finished blueprint on the first lightbulb flash.

Of course, with every idea I mention, he’s talking about how to build it. I’m interested in how to build it, too, because I don’t want to fully develop an idea that’s not possible to execute, but I don’t want him to have the whole thing mentally built before I have my idea fully conceived.

If he read my blog, he’d know more about how my mind works.

I am thinking at this point about installing a wide cedar beam, running horizontally high along the wall. Then, from this beam, we’d have pendant lights hanging down, sort of above and behind us, to act as reading lights.

The individual fixtures would have on/off switches on them and the entire affair would be controlled by a wall switch. I also want some kind of up-lighting from the top of the beam.

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

Kentucky is a Commonwealth, not a State!

Yes, I’ll bet you knew that. And so is Virginia. I will leave it to the curious among you to find out the differences between a Commonwealth and a State. Kentucky is now posted! And yesterday, I posted Jack’s pics of Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

I’m making headway! As of today, I have 19 of the state capitol pages published. Yay, me! Here’s the link to this project.

I did some adulting yesterday! I had my teeth cleaned, which is, aside from a few trips to Walmart, the most dangerous thing I’ve done, with regards to Covid-19.

I also made an appointment to get Jodie groomed. She’s so tangled and matted that I’m feeling like a terrible dog mom. I don’t know why her topknot gets so matted. Drives me crazy and I just simply cannot comb the mats out without both of us crying.

I still have not gotten brave enough to get my own hair cut.

We’re working a little more on our new living room. I’m setting up a lighting system that I really hope is the answer to our lighting issues. I want lights we can read by, turn off when we are not needing them, and which look great. I want a bit of a repeat of the island lighting fixture with the gas pipe and lights hanging off of it.

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Computers General myJanee.com News

File Management as a Way of Life

I’ve been spending hours of the past few days mudding through my files and trying to get them managed. That’s a question that many new Photoshop students have: how do I organize my photos?

When you first start taking digital photos, it’s easy. You have a Pictures folder in your computer and there they go! But then you go and look one day and you have 500 pictures. Some are of your nephew’s Bar Mitzvah, some are random try-out-the-camera shots, some are of your puppy, and some are of your trip to Crater Lake. It’s just like mom’s shoebox of photos from your childhood.

So how is the “best” way to organize your photos? Well, damned if I know! But I can tell you how I organize mine. If you have a better plan, or even a different one that someone may want to try, add it in the comments.

For my life, it works well to organize myself by years. Within each year, I separate out by event. For an epic trip, I’ll sometimes separate out each state.

For my United States project, I can find a picture of the Illinois capitol by going to Camera Uploads > Statehouses > IL. Easy peasy.

However you do it, it’s best to keep up with it. Pretty close to when you upload your pics to your computer, you should file them away so that you can find them, and so that you’ll remember where they were taken.

Today I was working on organizing some files from 2014. You can see some of my categories at the right. And, of course, I’m not done arranging 2014, because I have many “misc” photos just floating in the 2014 folder.

I’ve gotten some more pages posted from my Our United States collection. I’ve discovered, to my frustration, that I accidentally deleted all of my files for Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky. In addition, I’ve somehow lost my camera which I used for last summer’s trip. I am quite sure that the disk in the camera contains my pictures for Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. :/ I’ve learned a few things about taking care of pictures that will be hard to replace. <sigh>

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General myJanee.com News My Day Photoshop Travel Tales

More thrilling happenings at myJanee.com!

Nebraska is posted along with all 29 of the photos that I chose! As with all of them, Nebraska’s is a very interesting Capitol building, but this one has some particular allure. I wrote a bit about it in my commentary following the pictures.

And I posted Iowa! Probably the hardest part of this project is culling through the dozens of photos to find what I deem worth posting here. While I do not claim to be a photographer, I do love taking pictures. Now and then, I come up with something that’s almost good!

Just posted Delaware and Florida. I’m on fire today!

I don’t do significant Photoshop editing for most of these — Perspective Crop on many, Levels Adjustment Layer for most, and Smart Sharpen on all. There are a few that I do some cloning to take away a car or an obvious flaw. And sometimes, I do something like remove scaffolding!

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

Writing in my blog makes me smile!

Yes, writing in my blog makes me smile. That’s mostly because I think that I’m the only one who reads it, and I don’t go back and read it often. So it’s really just notes to God, I suppose.

So today, even though it’s Sunday, I’m working. I posted new pages for Arkansas and Colorado today. So now they join Washington, Oregon, Kansas, California, Arizona, and Alaska! Please go and have a look! These are linked from my Our United States page.

I’m loving our new furniture arrangement! I don’t love the rug in the new TV room, so no pics yet, but the space makes more sense to me. It’s a comfortable use of the space. Even though we actually have MORE furniture in there, it seems less crowded.

The only piece of furniture we are getting rid of at this point is the dining room hutch that housed all of my puzzles, glassware, napkins, and a few decorative pieces. All of those are on our kitchen island till I box them up.

They will ultimately go into the TV cabinet that Jack’s talking about building. This will also house my puzzle collection, which is frustratingly hidden in my bedroom in that corner cabinet with the curved glass door which we moved twice but now must go.

I know that I seem to always be moving, rearranging, refurnishing. But that’s just how I was made. I’ve been rearranging furniture since I was a child and Annette and I redid our room often.

I wonder if Annette remembers how we arranged it so that our furniture was all in the middle of the room, leaving a path around the wall. We had bunkbeds, but we often put them down side by side, so that our room would look more like a hotel room.

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

Preventing Insomnia in Your Computer

I’ve found myself using the “How to Geek” site more often than I’d like to admit. I’m a woman, after all, and I’m not supposed to concern myself with such matters, right? I know. WRONG!

Of late, my computer has had some insomnia. It awakens in the middle of the night, lights flash, it makes noises, then it goes back to sleep. How to fix? I haven’t gotten to the bottom of it yet, but this site has diagnostic strategies that seem reasonable. This is for Windows 10.

I’ve been continuing work on my States project. Yesterday, I completed AZ and CA. Today I’ve added Oregon! You can access this project from THIS LINK.

In other news, we got our sectional today! It’s big and beautiful (pictures soon) and it should solve a few of our issues.

  • Jodie can sit with us while we are resting in the evening (though she has always preferred the floor).
  • If we are ever able to have guests again, it forms a sweet conversation area, which we were missing in our other arrangement. This area now will comfortably seat 7.
  • If we are ever able to have family visit again, we can all sit on the sectional and watch TV.
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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

Alaska Page Added: Alaskans are “frankly amazed” at the quality of the page

Yeah! I added Alaska! The capitol is … not very nice, but it’s there. I posted a few trail pix, too, just so the page would have some color.

In going through my Alaska pics, I found that I had many other non-Alaska pics in there. And I had a ton of extraneous non-whale pics. These are pics that one shoots when one is trying to get a pic of an actual whale, but then it dives under.

Today I’m working on photos for Kansas’ page. If I do “just” one state a day, I’ll be done in just 50 days!

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales WordPress

Another ALL NEW Post type!

The excitement never stops over here at myJanee.com! Pixels are a-flyin’ and I’m getting things done. Today I added another new post type to my site — States. I’m doing this with the Custom Post Type plugin, which has been handy for me.

This is where my state pages are housed. That’s right: I made new pages, one for each of the 50. They are all blocked and ready to be filled with wonderful pictures of all of our adventures. Well, those and the state capitol pix, too! The pages are not posted yet.

Other than arguing on the Photoshop Beginners group that one actually CAN do vector artwork in Photoshop, slowly recovering from this shingles shot, and grieving over the passing of one of our more esteemed Supreme Court Justices, life has been pretty quiet. I did edit some of my Washington State photos and posted them. Maybe it’s time for more art.

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

State Capitol pix are posted for Washington!

I know. You didn’t even know that this was on my list, did you? Jack and I are going around to visit all of the state Capitols, and we have done all but a few. Now I’m putting these all up on my site! The index page is here.

The state pages will include not just capitol photos, but also a few of our general snaps from each state. Ambitious, I realize, but you don’t expect anything else from me, do you?

So far I have done a page for Washington. And I have pics up there! I am going to be posting more of our Washington pix, like our Seattle trips, but these are the ones from Olympia – the capital!

I’m feeling way better today. Yesterday I was running a bit of a fever and just felt puny. I didn’t go anywhere at all and just mostly did web stuff and otherwise sat around. I’m sure it was just my body’s reaction to the shots.

And… in other news, so far, at least, State Farm ROCKS. As soon as they found out that we had our crash, they were all over us — wanting to make sure we were ok, if we needed a rental car, if the RV park needed money to put their sign back up, and making sure that we told them whom to pay. Love them!

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Janee's Galleries My Day Photoshop Travel Tales

New Artwork! New Links! Still zero visitors!

LOL that headline got a score of 74/100. Today I did some more art! And I finished up with my Archive Tutorial updating project! If you should happen to be reading this, should happen to go to my Archive Tutorials and find a link that needs to be fixed, please use the Contact Janee link above to find me and tell me.

So in my updating, I am reminded of what an amazing body of work lies in my tutorials. Not only did I work very hard on them, but they are quite good! Of course, a few things have changed while I was away, but just a few.

So here’s the image that I’m about to post in my Text Effects gallery. I can’t even link to it, because it’s not even a page yet!

Hey! We finally got an estimate for our RV’s boo-boo. The cheap fix, which leaves out the minor scratches on the side, which we figure we would do in the first year from tree branches anyway, and the back storage door, is north of $6500. The good-to-go ready-to-put-on-the-sales-lot estimate is north of 11,000.

The good news is that State Farm will not be re-rating us for this, since we have been such amazing accident-free and reliable-pay customers for … nearly 40 years. So now I have to figure out which way to go. Maybe I’ll ask on Facebook. Those folks seem to know everything. And I did. The consensus is to go on and have the whole thing fixed. An insurance guy said that it doesn’t matter to the insurance co if it’s 6500 or 11000 – a claim is a claim!

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Photoshop Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Destructive and Non-Destructive Editing in Photoshop

If you’ve spent any time in the Photoshop groups, you’ve surely been shamed once or twice for “destructive editing.” Well, if not, then, if you’re doing these destructive practices, they were thinking of shaming you!

Here’s a rundown of what’s what:

DestructiveNon-Destructive
Making an adjustment through a menu commandUsing an Adjustment Layer
Erasing part of your image layerUsing a Layer Mask
Painting on your image layerPainting on another layer over your image
Cloning onto your image layer“Use all layers” cloning onto a new layer
Using Dodge, Burn, Sponge, Healing Tool, or Patch on the image layer Using one of these tools on a Merged Visibles layer
Applying a Filter to your imageFiltering a duplicated layer of your image
Flattening your imageMaking a Merged Visibles layer

A Merged Visibles Layer is a shortcut I came up with. I don’t know if anyone else is doing them now.

What you do is to make all the layers visible that you want in this new layer. Anything you don’t want visible, turn off the visibility eye. In the Layers palette, click the top-most of your visible layers.

Now hold Ctrl-Alt-Shift and type E. (Note: some of my tutorials refer to CAS-NE or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N-E. You used to need the N. Now PS automatically puts the merged visibles onto its own layer.)