Thinking and Smiling

This morning we took an hour and streamed the final address to America from President Obama. That man is a great orator, he is inspiring and able to move you to look for the right path to follow into the upcoming new year and the next four years for America. I supported most all he has done for our country, I will miss him and his leadership.

Today I logged into our bank account and checked to see if there was a hard earned payment deposited there. Low and behold, as I scanned the screen, I found the deposit from the US Social Security  Administration. My first Social Security check arrived and was deposited into our account! Linda and I smiled, high fived, and then I quickly transferred it from our checking account to a savings account.

It was a bittersweet morning around the casa.

Iris Arrived

The newest member of the Las Palmas entourage arrived. Irisin got into town and she brought a friend from Edison with her. Now we have Iris and Sarah to goof around with once in a while.

I used my camera to capture the sunset last night. The pelicans were fishing and so I was able to catch them as they searched for dinner.

Hanging Out

Yes, that is all we are doing. Hanging out. All is well and the weather is perfect. I am posting so that I can tell Jacquie and Grant, we miss them.

I also want to mention two of our other friends Julia and Rob so that they can flip us the bird. They follow our posts and get upset because they can't join us. Just rubbing it in I guess.

Photo confessions: I took this picture along with several other photos from the same spot on the beach. Using Picasa, I put my usual contrast filter on it. Then I went into Photoshop Elements and opened the sunset photo in the background and found a photo that had the three skim boarders on it.

I removed everything on the skim boarder layer except the three boys and moved their features on top of the sunset in the center position. Then I cleaned a bunch of swimmers out of the sunset layer and flattened the image. When this was finished I took the photo into Picasa again and did a final filter for the color intensity.

When the photo was posted on Instagram it came out very color heavy. On Facebook, it looked much different. I'm not suer how this will look, but I'll give it a try.