June 2016 Highlights

What I Learned host Emily P Freeman hasn't posted and started the linkup yet, so I'll connect to her page later.

Learnings, observations, experiences...

• June's banner features a milkweed plant from the church window boxes! Interim pastor suggested planting milkweed to help replenish Monarch Butterflies, and I've taken pictures every week. As I told the social media guy, I've been editing the stucco paint on a few photos from each group so they'll present better, and plan to create a milkweed chronology to blog here soon. I am the stucco contractor—or am I the painter?

• As of the last Sunday of June I'd been in town for twelve months and I've lived in five very different sections of the city! The variety has been fun and interesting, but I'm more than ready to settle down somewhere longer-term. I'm not a put down deep roots into the ground type, but I long to unpack my boxes, acquire a few pieces of furniture, invite my neighbors in for tea and talk or out for sunshine and a walk.


Westwood • Koreatown • West Hollywood • Santa Monica • San Fernando Valley
• The end of June marked six whole entire months (and counting!) I've been teaching every Sunday morning—"Adult Sunday School."

• You need to be bilingual to work retail in this city—more so than in Former City that was much closer to the international border.

• Every subway sandwich shop in Current City includes cilantro in their salad bar.

• Hearts of gold still live on earth, still walk this planet. Sending gratitude, thanks, trust, and my amazement to all of them!



• I love Retail Therapy, and I've been ecstatic to discover very nearby Panorama City [an LA neighborhood and not an independently incorporated city] Mall and other shops. A clean, bright, open, spacious Walmart defies and shatters all stereotypes and embarrassing social media memes. I'm a big fan of GAP and Old Navy; here's a picture to add to ones I've taken of Mission Valley and (no longer there) Fashion Valley stores in Former City, along with Beverly Connection and Third Street Promenade in Current City.







• I started attending Thursday noon mindfulness meditation at the Hammer Museum again, and enjoyed my first view of the current exhibit.

• As a designer I experiment a lot with effects and ideas; I've been known to use a gradient map overlay combined with layer styles, transparencies, and filters to create some images that wow (at least) me. The cyan layer in a photographic print usually fades first, creating a usually not desired Martian effect, so when I edit a scan of an analog pic I usually bump up blue/cyan and/or reduce red/magenta as a remedy. Recently I accidentally on purpose "improved" a couple of pics with a green-blue gradient map and reduced opacity on the gradient map layer. In each case, original is left; improved on the right:



Mount Olympus original scan:

• I'd already Photoshopped a couple dozen versions of Mount Olympus from my East Millcreek Utah back yard; the version I used for the gradient map was cooler than my original scan and was professionally viable, yet in comparison the newer one with added gradient map is better.



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