A boring week in winter

The weather turned a bit nasty this week. Rain on Monday which lay on top of the ice and froze on Tuesday, extremely strong blizzards on Wednesday and dull snowy wintry days on Thursday and Friday. So I didn't get out much (plus the wife has been working leaving me carless). We did make it out to Onuma but the weather was awful and there wasn't much about apart from the usual.





Around my neighbourhood I saw Hawfinch, Long Tailed Rosefinch, Brambling, Redpoll, Merlin and Peregrine as well as flocks of Grey Starling and Dusky Thrush (but still no Waxwing). Photo opps were pretty limited and I was reduced to taking pics of the local Teal on the river.







*WARNING*


Boring nerdy topic coming up


I've also been trying to suss out some of the more intricate features of photoshop. I've been using photoshop for about 18 months or so but only did simple stuff like levels/saturation/unsharp mask etc. I'm now working with selections and hope to move on to masking and layers. It's frustrating and this added to the need to start filling out my tax returns has given me a headache. Here's a pic that needed photoshopping (it wasn't that great to start with anyway as I had to crop it heavily).



The blurry stuff to the right is the blue railing on the riverside fence. Still don't know the best way to correct this kind of stuff (maybe it's impossible anyway) but I bet it's fiddly, takes ages and is f**king annoying as hell to do. I did lots of stuff to the image......magic wand tool, select colour, desaturate...........I'll work it out eventually I hope.

Here's our new addition to the fishtank. His name is P-Man.



A lot of the cheaper inverterbrates have been dying off at an alarming rate so at ¥1500 a pop I hope this Cleaner Shrimp manages to stay alive a while yet. He is being relentlessly bullied by the Clownfish who is king of the tank and is a lazy spoilt bast*rd of a fish.

So not much happening round here at the moment. The Japanese media is currently in a frenzy about contaminated frozen gyoza (dim sum) from China. It has allowed the Japanese press to indulge in rabid anti-Chinese sh*t stirring in a racist 'how can we trust those dirty foreigners' tone that would make editors of the Daily Mail wince. The fact that the contamination may have been the fault of the Japanese import company or that Japan has had its' fair share of food scandals doesn't seem to concern them.

Can't believe the Premier League wants to play abroad. Is this the beginning of the end? I hope the EPL (to use its' international moniker) financially implodes so we can forget all this nonsense. I hate to say it but even a fully fledged Euro league would be better, at least Liverpool would stay in NW England and not be renamed 'Dubai Reds' or something like that.

By the middle of February I'm usually sick of winter and Feb 2008 is no exception. Roll on March.