About a week ago, The musical Ms. Feeling Croppy plugged a couple of coffees that just so happened to feature pictures from her flickr photostream. I usually get my stuff from a local place, but I couldn't pass this up... that, and she had some coupon codes which pretty much took care of shipping. Two roasts: sunriser and talent, from 322/365 Bunny Slippers and 103/365 Fly Like A Beagle, Big Ass Ears Will Carry Me, respectively. Oh yeah, here's a link to where you too can get this coffee. After ordering them, I decided to do some sort of feature. I've wanted to do something on all my coffee crap for a while (there's a couple of things not pictured here) so thought this would be a good opportunity. I had the idea to show myself making the coffee, but couldn't get myself in frame in a good way, so I decided to shrink myself. I get my grind, boil the water, steep... using my remote to catch several shots of the process. After I move the french press, I realized I forgot to include the thing I was supposed to be featuring! So, because I had already moved the FP, I decided to take it out of the shot completely, since I wouldn't be able to place it exactly the same.... meaning I had one more thing to mask in. The masking was fairly straight forward if you're familair with that process. I ran into two problems though: One, I have no idea how to adjust the tones of one layer to make it appear it was taken at the same time as the background. I tried a few things and think it's much better than it was, but it could've been better. Also, the version of Gimp I have doesn't have a very good layer scaling function. Instead of having an option to drag and drop corners, you have to enter in numeric values for pixels or percentage... I'm sure there's probably some sort of plug-in. But as it was, I'm damn lucky that the handle to the FP was almost exactly 25% the size of the pictured bouncy ball, which is what I used as a reference to place the mini-me. If anybody has some tips on either of these issues, Id love to hear them.

As to their functions and palatabilities, shopping-mall-cinnamon-roll flavors of additive goos for coffees and Jergens ladies' legs' lotions are approximately indistinguishable. That presentation ham looks like it could use a little something; I will nose my bottle of Facebook Brut between the slices and give it a squirt. Stuff has probably gotten reformulated since when I was a kid, but I can remember from the self-directed household chemistry experiments of my childhood that you could mix Brut 33 cologne together with Grey Flannel cologne to come up with an odour resembling that of rancid peanut butter. Perhaps today's generation of young are conducting similar experiments with the International Delight chemi-creamers. ---------------------------- Selections from a "SmartSource" discount coupon supplement in the April 10th, 2011, edition of the Star Tribune newspaper of Minneapolis, Minnesota.