Tintagel's Cielo Azul de Beardsandbrow, HIC whelped 9 beautiful, healthy puppies: 2 black boys, 1 tawny boy, 3 black girls, and 3 tawny girls. All pups and Cielo are doing well. I expect that there will be more details and pictures at Tintagel Briards' website shortly.

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Finally got to see this. I missed it during it's initial release but our local second-run theater just offered a showing I could make. The sound and print quality were pretty bad, but the movie was pleasant. The best part was an incidental fish at the very end. A young child in the theater exclaimed "Fishy!" which pretty much summed up my response.

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I tripped across this while looking for something else and feel I really must come back to it later: The Dog Fiend.

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... that is designated "lawn" has been mowed. N spread lime and grass seed earlier so it looks a lot more lawn-like than usual and if it had gotten any taller we wouldn't have been able to push-mow it. N and I tag-teamed it.

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Saw this last with my godson. It was pretty good. We stayed for both extras. I particularly liked the final extra.

Since it seems like pretty much everyone has already seen this, in lieu of a review, some random observations: I loved Agent Hill; I was disappointed that Pepper basically had a cameo in the film; I was distracted by Tony's arc reactor not glowing through his t-shirt during one conference scene (there was a second scene were it was glowing but the ambient light made it difficult to see which didn't seem to be the case here); there were a lot of little touches that I liked; I continue to be unimpressed by a lot of movie destruction, but I adored the giant space viperfish-creatures; Joss did that thing wrt character death that he does, which seemed a bit less audience-manipulative here that it has seemed elsewhere; Ruffalo's Banner reminded me a lot of Colombo (in a good way).

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Hunger Games book 3
Suzanne Collins

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By Suzanne Collins

Even more depressing than book one, but still as engrossing. I love that romance is so far off Katniss's radar in terms of her everyday life and concerns as to be a complete non-issue to her personal life (despite the fictional romance she's very conscious of needing to maintain) and that she grows from being focused on the lives of her family and friends to the larger political picture as her immediate needs are met (it's not easy to be politically active if it takes all your resources to literally put food on your family's table).

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Three students yesterday for the all-day class (there were suppose to be four but one had to cancel), two with the same camera, none with photo-editing software. One student had lost her camera but came to the class anyway and said she learned a lot even without it.

I showed them basic editing/cropping/resizing with IrfanView, which is very budget friendly. I understand why many people recommend going straight to Adobe products (which I use myself) but think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to be able to lay out the cash for it (even just for Elements), plus it really is possible to use DIY light tents and continuous lighting to get results that *don't* need sophisticated photo-editing to look really good.

I always ask students to bring their beaded work and we spend most of the day setting up and photographing it since it gives them hands-on experience with their own cameras, I can offer them solutions to the problems they've been encountering at home*, and they leave the class with pictures of their own work that they are really happy with and can show off.


*including translating their user-manual instructions from documentation to actual usage.

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By Kate DiCamillo

I love Kate DiCamillo's work, but this story fell a bit flat for me. A theme of the book is the truth is always changing, but I wish that the truth didn't always seem to mean finding your missing biological family and living happily ever after.

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Last week was the last night of my digital-color-darkroom class, for which I am extremely grateful.

My *summer* school plans mostly involve trying to set up more herding lessons for Fezzik, but the sheep are still lambing, so that probably won't start until June or later.

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