Category: Travel Tales

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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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Janee's Galleries My Day Travel Tales

New Celtic Knot Artwork on Display

I usually like to swallow the toad early in the day, but today, I began by doing the fun stuff. Then I swallowed some toads this afternoon.

What fun? I got into a few more Celtic knot adventures, and came up with an original! This one represents Janee, Jack, and Jodie, all of our hearts interwoven and bound together with a ring of love. Ok, all together now: AWWWW!

This afternoon, I did some work with updating my Archive tutorials. I know I was going to just leave the archived ones un-updated, but I just couldn’t stand having dead links in them.

I got as far as Pen 2, which means that I got into the HTML and edited EIGHT of these today.

The other toad I swallowed was this: I set up the recurring payments for the RV, so it won’t be repossessed before it gets out of the shop. :/ I know that someday I’ll look back on this and think, “Was there some reason that we didn’t just go off on a trip in 2020 — the hottest summer EVER in Phoenix?
What stopped us?”

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My Day Travel Tales

New Art on Display

Yay! It’s about time I did something creative that I can actually post. Today I finished a piece of Celtic knot art. It’s in Photoshop, of course, and I did it all in vectors this time around. And I did it all mathematically, so that it’s pretty regular. This is on display in my Geometrics Gallery.


So what else is new? I just noticed that my blog entries are no longer showing a date! I will fix that.

I’m done grousing about how bad video tutorials are, and I’m welcoming the present into my life. To be more precise, while I’m not buying into the idea that print is dead, I’m going to make some video tutorials and get set to teach some video classes.

I need to get a camera, and I’m in negotiations with the man who shares my house as to which one to get. I’m usually one to spend nearly as much as I can, and I like to have the good one. Jack is ok with spending as little as possible and then buying another in 3 months, when it’s obvious that the cheap one isn’t good.

I’ve done some more research, jumping down interesting rabbit holes, and have added more links to my Photoshop Resource Links pages.

Still no word on whatever astronomical estimate we’re going to get for our new RV. I’m still hopeful for a November get-away, but as that month comes closer, I’m less sure that it can happen. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

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My Day Travel Tales

Stop Sign Mysteriously Wrecks New RV

Yeah, I have no pictures of this. We were trying to get the rig turned around to get to our RV spot for our *first night* in it. Instead of simply driving to the end of the lane and looping around, we opted to turn around the shorter, easier way — make a U-turn at the park entrance.

I was driving and was well into the maneuver when I thought that the stop sign seemed very close to the right side. “You’re going to miss it by a mile,” Jack assured me.

We did not miss it by anything at all. As the rear of the RV swung to the right, the sign scraped half the way down the side and ripped up the fiberglass cap on the back of the formerly beautiful RV.

It’s on me, I know. But it’s also a bit on Jack. But, yeah, I know. It’s me, and I’ll be paying handily for it, unless we decide to let insurance have its way with us.

Picacho Peak

We did enjoy a few days at Picacho Peak RV resort anyway. We drove down to Tucson one day, up to Casa Grande one day, ate some Eegee’s, had some ice cream, and mourned that we we really had to get the thing fixed before we could actually go on a trip. It’s in for its first estimate right now. ugh.

In brighter news, we did enjoy the RV. Aside from a couple of glitches, like we can’t figure out how to get any TV to work, it drives easily, lives comfortably, seats nicely, and sleeps well.

Jack has come up with some ideas of cabinetry additions — drawers, essentially, that he’s going to add. And he wants to make little drink tables for the couch arms.

Jodie did well. She threw up on the way down, but did not on the way back home. We had her tethered to the couch seatbelt and she slept comfortably most of the trip.

We tried a couple of different crating options. We made the dinette into a bed and put her crate in the center part. The worked nicely except.. no dinette for us!

So then we tried just using the crate sides as baby gates to close off the bathroom/shower area. That worked very well. At night, we just left the bath door open so that she (and we) remained closed into the back part of the RV. We all slept well that way.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement Travel Tales

New Photoshop Pen Tool Tutorial

I’ve been busy, busy! Today I finally finished my all-new Pen Tools in Photoshop Tutorial! In this one, I go through some detail with how to use the Pen tools and why anyone would want to do that in the first place.

I take you through such riveting projects as creating my feather to the right and making this flourish as you see below.

I just love doing vector graphics, and should probably take another dive into Illustrator, but not today.

And Jack and I bought an RV yesterday. We had sold our 2019 View the day before. It was just too small for us. We did like the beds in back, but, once we got out of bed, it was a fail. We decided that we just need more space for all 3 of us.

We found a 2019 slightly used Pace Arrow 33D in Anthem, went to see it, and loved it. They’re doing some little projects for us: adding solar panels, installing window awnings, putting in a washer/dryer. We will be picking it up in 2 weeks. Here are some teaser pics of it:

Jodie became instantly well when we went and got her a new bag of food. We’re still feeding Pro Plan Savor, which she LOVES, but that was just a bad bag. I emailed Purina, but got no answer. We had been feeding her puppy food, and it was suggested in my Standard Poodle FB group that she should be on adult, so we switched.

We also had her groomed yesterday and, so far, knock wood, she’s doing fine. Recall that she had gotten sick the day after her grooming every time we have taken her to her first groomer. We took her to a different groomer this time. If you have a reason to want to know what groomer we are now patronizing, email me.

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My Day Travel Tales WordPress

Making a mailto link… and other amazing things

Jack and I have discovered that it takes as much work to get going on and re-enter from a small trip as it does for a very long one. The small trip in question is the Show Low jaunt from which we just returned.

We had left to escape the simmering summer heat here, and we were mostly successful. While it was 116 here a couple of the days, it was “only” 95 there, and that’s a 24 degree difference! But it still felt hot.

We had lots of fun, mostly with Jodie at the Dog Park at Venture Inn, the RV Resort. She behaved very nicely with all of the other dogs, and they all seemed to like her. There was a big cottonwood tree right in the middle of the park and everyone sat in chairs and talked, as we watched the dogs play.

We learned some things, as one hopes to do, when one is on one’s maiden voyage in a new RV. We learned that we are happiest when we have a spatula and a serving spoon, but that we won’t die without them.

Even with both of us showering twice and doing dishes daily and no bathhouse available, we still only used 1/3 of the graywater tank and 2/3 of the black water in a full week. We have both gotten pretty good at conserving water!

And the recliners that are standard with the Winnebago View V are really not good. The springs are not adequate to hold the position when you try to actually recline. Buzz. We may be seeking new recliners. Jack got us new springs, but they are not easy to install, so we will wait till it’s less than 400 degrees to try the project again.

We made Reflectix covers for all of the windows. That stuff, which looks like shiny silver bubble wrap, is great for keeping the heat outdoors and the cool indoors. Except when it’s cold! Then they keep the cold out very well.

Today I did a little more touching up on my site. I updated my Contact Janee page, and figured out how to do a mailto link in WordPress:

  • Highlight the part that you want to be hyperlinked.
  • Click the link button at the top.
  • In the URL section type Mailto:?Subject=Tutorial Question (or whatever you want the Subject line to read.)
  • Click Enter.

I did a few cosmetic changes to my Dog Portrait tutorial.

And I looked at some long-forgotten, long-hidden, probably for the best, pages on my site. I wonder, really, how many pages and how many files I do have. At one time, I had over 25,000 files. I’m quite sure I have many more than that now.

Here’s one of the pictures I found, for example. This was one of my early site interfaces. I always thought it was kinda pretty, although, looking at it now, the lighting on me should have been different.

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My Day Travel Tales

Who was that unmasked man?

Today was a mellow and relaxing day for us. We love that our site here at Venture Inn is so close to the dog walk and the dog park! We took Jodie to the dog park and she played with a tiny feisty dog named Ralph. He kept barking at her and trying to get her to run and play and it was so cute.

We went to Walmart and Safeway this afternoon, and, if I should come down with Covid, and they’re trying to do contact tracing on me, I’d have to say I got it today. The number of loud unmasked undistanced people was disturbing. We wore our masks and tried to steer clear of everyone. And we got slippers. And milk. And forgot to get water.