Heart 2 Heart

My theme today is hearts, the iconic symbol for the day. I've written about it in the context of things nearest and dearest that pop into my brain for this article.

Valentine's Day! It seems to have sneaked up on me very quickly this year! Last year, I had plenty of time to publish my convenient cooky recipe for making heart-shaped, red cookies using two flavors of cake mix. If you feel you have time to run to the store to get the ingredients and bake them, go for it! OTOH, you can just stretch the Valentine celebration (observation) for the whole week and wait until the weekend to bake them.

The pixstrip at the top of the article is an assemblage of some pictures I took at my most previous visit to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center These prickly pear cacti caught my eye because of heart shapes. At that time, I knew I'd want to write something up and include cropped pictures of them.

Another heart theme item I'm including in this article is info about PaintShopPro's picture tube feature, specifically hearts. (PaintShopPro is a graphics editing tool.) The associated pixstrip is a screen capture with the Picture Tube icon, icon label, my "spray" of hearts, and the Tool Options dialog box with option selections. My version of PaintShopPro is very old, so the interface does not resemble the ones from a webpage that discusses PSP picture tubes.

If you use PSP and want to download picture tube images, visit Corel's Paint Shop Picture Tubes webpage

This year, I myself am skipping making the cookies. I think I had been making them annually for about five years straight, sometimes for two to three different groups of people I'd see. Several conditions have converged to nudge me to forego the activity. Although I had re-entered the working world back in July after a 17-month hiatus, my perception of decreased discretionary time seems to have settled in only right after the new year started. Even towards the end of 2010, I managed to adhere to my self-imposed goal of publishing an article three times a month, one for every 10-day division. So far, I've managed to post only one last month and this one this month. Not sure if I will manage another article before February ends.

Here's a thought if you have enough fortitude to resist the psychological exertion to DO SOMETHING TODAY. Wait till tomorrow. I'm looking forward to tomorrow (Tuesday). That's the day the stores and drugstores knock off 50% for the cookies and candies. The meal? Just offsetting it a day. For an article that provides a different view of Valentine;s Day, read the New York Times' "When Love Outgrows Gifts on Valentine’s Day"

If you feel you must DO SOMETHING TODAY, here's a list of last minute suggestions for the day. Pick any, some, or all:

• Card
• Candy
• Stuffed animal
• Trinket, gadget, or bauble
• Heart-shaped cookies
• Favor coupons that you create
• Meal out
• Meal in
• Other thing(s) that come to mind

Have a happy day, whatever you do!

Create Monthly Calendars for the Year

Did you get a 2010 calendar recently? Get one for a Christmas gift? Buy one for yourself? Bank give you one? Some other business give you one? Calendars used to be assumed freebies, which seemed to be in short supply this season. The other day, I asked a bank teller about calendars. She pointed out a small stack of pocketbook-sized ones. Well, it’s adequate for viewing month to month, but the cells measure only 1.2" wide by 1" high.

I decided to visit an online calendar utility for viewing and creating custom calendars. I wound up creating and printing out all 12 months for the year in landscape orientation, double-side printing them onto six sheets. This type of calendar is good for scribbling short notes on a month-to-month basis. I myself like the days-of-week column arrangement to reinforce weekly occurrences.

For making the calendar, I used a Firefox browser with PaintShopPro7 (PSP) graphics editor, and selected options at http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar. (The default view shows a 3-row by 4-column setup for an entire year, tweakable for preferences.) I experimented with the browser screen sizes for graphics capture, then previewed and tweaked the page setup in PSP for printing maximum cell sizes.

If you want to make your own monthly calendar, start at http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar and click Advanced customization. At the new screen, the critical selections are as follows:

• Calendar period=1 month
• Format=[your preference]
• Add space for notes=[some vertical spacing per cell]
• Main template=[your preference]

When done with selections, click Show calendar. For the rest of the procedure to set up and print the first month, YMMV. To prepare the browser to capture screens, I set my browser for maximum size; i.e., clicked the Maximize button (restored to full screen). To obtain more vertical viewing space, I turned off the navigation and status bars (browser view menu), and pulled down the task windowshade to close it.

To set my graphics editor to capture screens, I opened PSP and set it to use a cursor for dragging and defining a capture window.

An alternative to setting the browser for maximum and setting the graphics editor for windowing the area: Resize the browser so only the calendar appears, then set the graphics editor for Object capture. This setting enables capturing only the object inside the window.

To prepare the application to print, I set up page settings to Landscape and Fit to page. I then tweaked settings by unchecking Fit to page, and accepting the new default margins.

I created the rest of the months for the year by doing the following:

1. Scrolled the browser upward until I saw the links for previous/next month.
2. Clicked the next month.
3. Scrolled the browser downward until I got the full view of the month.
4. Captured and printed the months as I did for January.

Yup, I'm set up for the rest of the year now.