Heavenly Crafts

...I have taken up running with my boys. The only problem is, none of us likes running when there are people around to watch (and laugh!) which means we have to get up extra early to go run around the football field!

So far, this is the fourth week and I am now up to 8 laps around the field. It is not a full sized football pitch, more like the size you get at school, but even so, I feel suitably noble managing (crawling?) around the field eight times. Of course, there are not many people around at 5:30 am when we go, fortunately. Otherwise they would have the joy of seeing me do a bouncy walk around the field dressed in jogging bottoms and top, both of which I wore when my daughter and I painted my office on February. This means, of course that the black trousers and navy top are covered in platters of lilac paint - very fetching!

One of my boys is aiming to go to University in September. He is the one who started the running thing off, as he is hoping to get a place in a catered hall of residence. So what does that have to do with running? Well, his theory is, he will put weight on if he is having three meals a day five days in the week (the hall only provides two meals a day on Saturday and Sunday, poor boy!) then he is bound to put weight on. So, he aims to lose some excess weight now then he can afford to put it back on each term and then come home in the holidays and run it all off again. Of course, the logical thing would be to just eat sensibly and take exercise anyway, but then he is male, and logic plays no part in his life!

One of the local colleges has been running a free Photoshop course and of course, since it is free, I have taken advantage of this and have been going regularly. However, it was a bot of a blow on the first day to arrive there and find we weren't using Photoshop CS3, but Photoshop Elements 2.0! Nothing like using the latest software, eh? Since my project on this course is to complete my part of the ADSDesigners July kit, I have been making papers for this on the course. This has been a huge learning curve for m,e, because whilst the course is very basic, and it took about 4 weeks before I even learnt anything new, PSE 2.0 is different from PS CS3, and most of my brushes and other stuff just won't work on PSE 2.0! so, when creating papers, I have had to basically design everything from scratch! And yes, I know the aim is to do that anyway if you are a designer, but I am only a beginner, and still have so much to learn.

Actually, most of us on the course (there are only about 8 of us) are around the same age and there are three of us women there who have freely admitted that whilst we came on the course to learn more about Photoshop, it is really good to be able to go home and tell our husbands we have "been on a course." Obviously, the course is educational, and therefore good for us because we are learning, but in reality, we each go to play! We spend the evening messing around in PSE, playing with brushes, retouching photographs, designing, using filters and so on, and having fun, and then go home and pretend it was all hard work! Then, of course, we can carry on at home because we are "working on our project"!!! And tomorrow, we get a certificate to prove we have attended the course! Actual documentation to prove we haven't just been wasting our time, lol! How good is that?!!!

OK, I'd have to go do breakfasts for the children and do the school run now. Hope you all have a lovely day. I am hoping to get chance to upload some photos from an airshow we went to recently as well as make some crumpled papers I've just seen a great tutorial for this and want to have a go but need to do a VAT return first - oh what an exciting life I lead!