Black holes

It's the 1st of June today.  The first day of winter.  Right on time it's turned cold.  And wet.  Although to tell the truth Canberra's been cold all through May already.  Canberra always felt like a Black Hole during winter.  It feels like a yawning and gapingly huge Black Hole now. 

I went down to feed Freelance this morning and I put her lovely warm rug on her.  It's a beautiful rug that I got last season, and touch wood I can feel safe that she's snug and dry.  She's looking well.  I'm not sure whether the rain will see my riding lesson cancelled on Monday, Grant will call to tell me.

My computer change over has finally worked.  The 'old-new' machine has been erased, had the operating system reinstalled, and is boxed up and ready for the courier to collect.  The 'new new machine' has had the essentials migrated across, and I spent yesterday reinstalling fresh copies of my software.  I'm sure it's going to work far better as a result.  And anything I've missed I know how to copy across from the backup, so I feel across that.  Plus I have the Lovely David to fall back on should I get mixed up. I thought I had lost all my Photoshop actions, including the watermark ones, which take me so long to remember how to do, so I groaned in despair for a little while, then went hunting for them in the backup, as I'd done an export, and hurrah, they were still there.  That was a good thing, because this evening I've just felt flat and down, and it was a headache I didn't want.

The mystery that is iCloud is still not set up, and I've deleted at least one of those emails (the bronwenhealy@me one?????  I can't remember), so hopefully no one will try to send me an email on those emails, and will use my 2 usual email addresses.  Not that I'm expecting emails on those accounts anymore, but thought I should mention it.

Now that I have the computer going properly, I am trying to tackle all the work I have to get through in earnest.  Today I've spent some time rescanning negatives, and think I've got the settings on the scanner with the new software sort of under control.  I've redone some of them, because I wasn't happy with the original scans, and think they look better.  

I also took the camera with the 500mm lens on it to Heath's soccer game this afternoon.  I had to scramble around for my older monopod, because I couldn't find the newer one.  And I discovered that the old one has fresh new padding of foam on it that I hadn't realised, which in an ideal world should delight me....  The foam padding on my other one fell apart and came off this autumn.  

I had to put the rain cover on, as it rained steadily for the whole match.  And not picking it up for a month seemed to make my left arm and hand tingly and numb afterwards, although how much of that was the cold I'm not sure.  I haven't even downloaded the images though yet, but Heath did pretty well.  He was in goals the first half, and the other team was pretty good and got about 3 past him.  He got a little down, then perked up with a couple of pretty good saves.  His new coach is far nicer to him than the last one and is really encouraging, and that's a nice thing, because Heath has terrible self confidence.

And no, I haven't gone back and tried to figure out where my deep etching went wrong.  I'll have to tackle that again this week.

Schillaci wins the Moir in 1992.  I'd had my camera a little bit over 12 months, and had hardly ever even take an photograph before getting it (my very first camera) as a 21st Birthday Present.  Probably not so bad for a beginner.  I didn't have to straighten the running rail in Photoshop either.

Black Caviar won the race named after this grey horse twice.  It's Schillaci.  I hardly knew what I was doing in the early days.  I'd only had my camera about 2 years when I took this in 1993.