My special skill
Jun. 3rd, 2010 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyI saw the end of the Nigella episode on before the news the other night. She was making something with golden syrup in it, but, she said, don't worry if you don't have golden syrup in the house. 'Just use dark golden syrup instead.' Thanks for that, Nigella, you've been a huge help.
I don't remember what she was making, but I was inspired by seeing the golden syrup to make Mary Woolley Pudding for dinner with my mother and her partner. 'We're having Mary Woolley Pudding,' I said, and my mother said, 'First catch your Mary Woolley,' as she always does because that joke never gets old. Mary Woolley Pudding is a simple steamed pudding flavoured with golden syrup. It's called Mary Woolley Pudding after one of my grandmother's old friends who gave her the recipe. My grandmother was scrupulous about recording who gave her recipes. Her old exercise book is filled with recipes for things like Betty's Biscuits. I don't know why she chose to title this one Mary Woolley Pudding, no possessive, but she did and so that's what we call it. It is a good pudding.
Mary Woolley's family also thought it was a good pudding. So much that they ate it for breakfast and thought this completely normal, and one of the Woolley children caused Mary no end of embarrassment after perusing the breakfast menu of a posh Melbourne hotel in the 1960s and bellowing to his mother on the other side of the room, 'Mum! They don't have pudding!' Shocked society matrons had fan themselves in horror.
'But we,' said my mother, concluding her tale, 'were never allowed to eat it for breakfast.' Not that she's bitter about that.
This week I have been busy preparing for an audit. Audit number two of four for the year, because of our merger. Necessary as per constitutional and contractual obligations, but I am a bit over them. Although I am enormously pleased when I print off a report for, say, tax withheld from wages, and it adds up to exactly what it says it should on the balance sheet. It is the most satisfying feeling in the world.*
Tonight is the last night of my Photoshop course. It's been good to learn bits and pieces, but the teacher is driving me batty. I used to teach basic computer skills classes for the local council and I keep thinking I could teach better than this woman. Except I don't know anything about Photoshop, so, apart from that, obviously. She has a friend amongst the students who has plenty of questions. How does she turn her daughter's blue eyes even bluer in this photo? So we all have to watch while they flick through identical photos and pick one and then decide to pick another and change the eye colour to blue and then to another blue and then to red for a laugh, ha ha ha. Also her favourite thing is to get a photo and put a new layer on it, coloured pink, always pink, and use the eraser to rub out some pink to see bits of the photo underneath. That looks 'classy', apparently.
I have been helping the older lady sitting next to me. She knows how to use a computer, but not instinctively. So if she wants to open something, say, she will look in menus randomly for the Open command rather than thinking, well, it's under File in every other application I use, so I will start there. But once she gets going, she has been doing things with kaleidoscope patterns that she will print onto fabric and embellish with ribbon embroidery. Last week I helped her to resize one of her kaleidoscope pictures, which she didn't know how to do, then she called the teacher over to tell her again. When the teacher had gone, she turned to me and said, 'Your explanation was better.' So, yes, I am good at teaching older people how to use computers.** It is my special skill.
Teacher lady told us that the Levels histogram, as seen here, refers to the colour spread out across the photo. As in, the left side of the histogram refers to the left side of the photo and the mid point refers to the middle of the photo and so on. So if there is a big spike on the left side of the histogram, that means the left side of the photo is darker than the right. Which isn't right, is it? When she came round, I said I thought the left side of the histogram showed how black the black in the photo was and the right side showed how white the white was, and she looked at me as if I were a dangerous lunatic. I know I didn't explain it well because, well, I'm learning this and not, say, teaching the course, but I'm fairly sure I'm more right than she is.
Finally, the teacher said that she was talking to the professional photographer who teaches the How To Use Your SLR Camera course and he showed her some amazing things in Photoshop. Like, he opens a nice photo and makes some adjustments and it becomes an even nicer photo! Which is what I wanted to learn, basically. So, um, two stars out of five for this course.
* That may be an exaggeration.
** Except for one of my mother's friends, who tried to delete a Word document but somehow deleted Word itself instead. She was beyond help, although I did reinstall Word for her and make her promise to only delete things from My Documents.
I don't remember what she was making, but I was inspired by seeing the golden syrup to make Mary Woolley Pudding for dinner with my mother and her partner. 'We're having Mary Woolley Pudding,' I said, and my mother said, 'First catch your Mary Woolley,' as she always does because that joke never gets old. Mary Woolley Pudding is a simple steamed pudding flavoured with golden syrup. It's called Mary Woolley Pudding after one of my grandmother's old friends who gave her the recipe. My grandmother was scrupulous about recording who gave her recipes. Her old exercise book is filled with recipes for things like Betty's Biscuits. I don't know why she chose to title this one Mary Woolley Pudding, no possessive, but she did and so that's what we call it. It is a good pudding.
Mary Woolley's family also thought it was a good pudding. So much that they ate it for breakfast and thought this completely normal, and one of the Woolley children caused Mary no end of embarrassment after perusing the breakfast menu of a posh Melbourne hotel in the 1960s and bellowing to his mother on the other side of the room, 'Mum! They don't have pudding!' Shocked society matrons had fan themselves in horror.
'But we,' said my mother, concluding her tale, 'were never allowed to eat it for breakfast.' Not that she's bitter about that.
This week I have been busy preparing for an audit. Audit number two of four for the year, because of our merger. Necessary as per constitutional and contractual obligations, but I am a bit over them. Although I am enormously pleased when I print off a report for, say, tax withheld from wages, and it adds up to exactly what it says it should on the balance sheet. It is the most satisfying feeling in the world.*
Tonight is the last night of my Photoshop course. It's been good to learn bits and pieces, but the teacher is driving me batty. I used to teach basic computer skills classes for the local council and I keep thinking I could teach better than this woman. Except I don't know anything about Photoshop, so, apart from that, obviously. She has a friend amongst the students who has plenty of questions. How does she turn her daughter's blue eyes even bluer in this photo? So we all have to watch while they flick through identical photos and pick one and then decide to pick another and change the eye colour to blue and then to another blue and then to red for a laugh, ha ha ha. Also her favourite thing is to get a photo and put a new layer on it, coloured pink, always pink, and use the eraser to rub out some pink to see bits of the photo underneath. That looks 'classy', apparently.
I have been helping the older lady sitting next to me. She knows how to use a computer, but not instinctively. So if she wants to open something, say, she will look in menus randomly for the Open command rather than thinking, well, it's under File in every other application I use, so I will start there. But once she gets going, she has been doing things with kaleidoscope patterns that she will print onto fabric and embellish with ribbon embroidery. Last week I helped her to resize one of her kaleidoscope pictures, which she didn't know how to do, then she called the teacher over to tell her again. When the teacher had gone, she turned to me and said, 'Your explanation was better.' So, yes, I am good at teaching older people how to use computers.** It is my special skill.
Teacher lady told us that the Levels histogram, as seen here, refers to the colour spread out across the photo. As in, the left side of the histogram refers to the left side of the photo and the mid point refers to the middle of the photo and so on. So if there is a big spike on the left side of the histogram, that means the left side of the photo is darker than the right. Which isn't right, is it? When she came round, I said I thought the left side of the histogram showed how black the black in the photo was and the right side showed how white the white was, and she looked at me as if I were a dangerous lunatic. I know I didn't explain it well because, well, I'm learning this and not, say, teaching the course, but I'm fairly sure I'm more right than she is.
Finally, the teacher said that she was talking to the professional photographer who teaches the How To Use Your SLR Camera course and he showed her some amazing things in Photoshop. Like, he opens a nice photo and makes some adjustments and it becomes an even nicer photo! Which is what I wanted to learn, basically. So, um, two stars out of five for this course.
* That may be an exaggeration.
** Except for one of my mother's friends, who tried to delete a Word document but somehow deleted Word itself instead. She was beyond help, although I did reinstall Word for her and make her promise to only delete things from My Documents.