Fevered Imagination

Being feverish for nearly three days left me with a lot of time on my hands. I didn't really want to look at blogs or even listen to music. Just wanted to lie there drifting, letting my mind wander wherever it wanted to go. We had been talking about shingling the house in cedar shingles. I liked thinking about that, about getting rid of the god-awful, ice blue siding and replacing it with warm cedar. I imagined how I might try to play with Photoshop to see if I could use Define Pattern and Fill commands to get some idea of how the house would look.
When I finally started to feel better, I taught myself how to use the Define Pattern command. It's very easy, if you know where to find it, which of course I didn't. It's right there in the edit menu. I went to the Pattern Maker command in Filters. Very interesting effects, but definitely not what I wanted to do. Once I got the pattern of tiles I wanted, I used the fill command to apply it to places I had selected on the house. I "painted" the trim in white and hung a few potted plants on the porch. Definitely a cozier house.

I spent a lot of time looking out the windows and skylights. There was enough life flying by to keep me engaged. On Friday a hummingbird came to our sliding door. We haven't seen a hummingbird since last summer. There it was staring in at us, as if to say, "I'm back, where's the food?" We filled the feeder and hung it, and within minutes this tiny bird that had flown all the way from Mexico or even further south, was back and enjoying a sip of nectar in the great northwest.

I'm feeling some better, and dread pirate roberts is quite the caretaker. As long as I don't think about how I managed to get such a virus I'll be fine. Nothing creeps me out more than thinking about the transmission of disease. Ugh. So, how are you?

The pirate sez: RD does not slow down for disease or infirmity easily, but she is a realist, so i knew that she was ill because she was a good patient. she sat or lay still. she let me do everything without jumping up to help. she ate two pieces of toast in two days, and no wine! a successful recovery with a recuperation moving along well. a model i should emulate, being a notoriously bad recuperator.

i had thought perhaps we would do a little video song and dance for our return to posting. record it and make it available as we have done before (though not singing and dancing). i recalled that we are both painfully shy, at least about singing and dancing (and talking) in public, before i even had to consider whether we could actually sing and dance. we might do so at home, but no peeking.

the house shingling project has more than cosmetic effect. the current siding requires painting periodically and is due soon. at least within my lifetime, maybe more than once, if things go well. also, it is a "composition wood product" and moisture will degrade it, sooner or later. number one cedar shingles, on the other hand, require zero maintenance, may well last longer than the structure and look nicer than painted siding, to my eye.