Red Rose Hip

It’s been bleak here – lots of gray, and yesterday it rained all day. But at least the rose hips are bright red and cheery.

For more posts with a little or a lot of red, visit Ruby Tuesday:

Zoo Drawing: Animal Identification, Please

My daughter has once again contributed a drawing for you to explore. Nu, so what do you see?

Thanks for playing!

Week with Zoo Flowers

On My Blog

Please read my post on child sexual abuse: Protect Children from Abuse – thank you to everyone who left comments.

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

• Discovered this week that a fellow Highland Parker, Joel Levy, has a blog called Becoming a Black Belt in Life. I discovered it because he stopped me on the street (I seem to have a reputation as a blogger) and told me about it!
• Jew Wishes has reviews on books by one of my favorite authors, Aharon Appelfeld: Iron Tracks, Badenheim 1939 and Laish.
• I really liked Robin’s photo of Shefayim Beach and Ann’s photo of a male pine grosbeak bird.
• Ilana-Davita talks in this post about books she is reading, so I will tell you that I just ordered three books: Stones by Michael Rockland, The Jew of Home Depot by Max Apple, and Flat Belly Diet by Liz Vaccariello. Flat Belly Diet is actually for my father; he is always interested in healthy diets, and someone must have recommended this book to him. If you meet him, you would say, why does he need to lose weight? He doesn’t. He needs to keep any fat he has and to stay healthy. I’m curious about the book.

Oh, and a brief parsha quiz: Who is Putiel? (and isn’t that a fab name?).
Annual link to the froggy song.

Mom Daughter in Sepia

I love the way portraits look in sepia. I took a piece of a photo that my son took and used this tutorial called Basic Sepia Tone Old Effect. In the tutorial it suggests changing the whole image to Grayscale; instead, I just used Desaturate on one layer in Photoshop.

Here is the original cropped section of the photo in full color. I used the clone stamp tool to change my husband’s bright lime t-shirt into the coloring of the tree behind. Here’s a good tutorial that demonstrates the use of the clone stamp tool.

For more photos with sepia, visit Sepia Scenes:

Caption Girl Studies Laptop

I was thinking of using a detail of this photo for this post called Why Use Thumbnails, and I would write: “Is she creating a great thumbnail layout for a blog?” Instead, I’ll just ask you to provide your own caption.