Continuing along with the Two Weeks of Creativity, here are yesterday’s entries. The theme yesterday was “Big & Small,” chosen by Brad and reviled by him shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, we trucked through it and both got our exercise done.

Day Two - Big & Small

Both of my sources for this theme’s entry are from Flickr. We have small plant by baarah, and Sequoia Wonder, Big Trees State Park, California by moonjazz.

Brad’s entry was significantly different than mine, and I like how his turned out. He also did more creative work in Photoshop as far as image compositing and editing goes.

Brad - Day Two - Big & Small

Let me take this moment to deviate from the topic at hand and say that I am thoroughly confused by WordPress’ image library tools. I just want to upload an image, provide a thumbnail of a dynamic size (so, have WordPress generate a custom thumbnail size), and have a click-through to the full-size image if I so choose. This has to be possible – I have a feeling I’m just missing something. Since this is the first I’ve really used it in a long time – we’re talking years – I think that’s a safe bet.

I was talking with my buddy Brad on Sunday after I took my girlfriend to the bus station for her two week trip back to Canada. I told him how I was bummed out that we were going to be apart again, although I was happy it was only two weeks this time instead of five. Time will likely fly by (and it already seems to be a bit!) since I’ll be so busy with work and getting settled into our new place, but Brad decided it could use a little bit of a fun boost, and so Two Weeks of Creativity was born.

Yesterday was the first day of the creative exercise, meant to both help pass the time and give ourselves a creative “break” from work and the other necessities of day-to-day life. Yesterday’s theme was “Flowers”, and my entry is below, which is followed by Brad’s.

Day One - Flowers

I found the picture of the lily from an AKVIS tutorial and modified it to expand the background.

Brad - Day One - Flowers

I had one once, named it Ping. Started chewing on my cords. So I got rid of it. Replaced it with a flash drive. Also named Ping. It was a win-win situation.

Arrived home this afternoon from our annual family vacation to the Wisconsin Dells. Probably the coolest part of the trip was getting to stand in the now-empty Lake Delton. On the Ducks tour, I learned that the lake was drained in just four hours, causing an area of the Wisconsin River to go from 65 feet deep to a mere 6 feet, due to all the sand Lake Delton washed out. I ended up taking a number of pictures, as that’s something I’ll probably never get to do again; I’ll process and post those when I get some time.

Being able to walk in a lake that I’ve visited and fished at almost every year since I was a little kid was a very surreal experience. The lake was largely overgrown in many areas with patches of grass, and the rest of the parts were sludgy, unstable expanses of sand and dirt. Stepping in many of the areas, you could look down and see the whole bed of sand shift under your feet. My foot got sucked down in more than one place, and, not surprisingly, apparently a woman wasn’t careful enough and was sucked into one of the sinkholes at some point after the flooding.

We also caught a walking stick.

I just switched from Helio to T-Mobile 10 days ago. Maybe I’ll write more about my overall experience with Helio later, but the reason for the switch wans’t exactly voluntary. Helio recently merged with Virgin Mobile, which I thought to be great news (although I’ll miss the Helio name) because it would bring much-needed mainstream support to the company, among other things. Unfortunately, approximately two weeks prior to the public announcement of the merger, their service took a fast nose-dive, so bad that I could no longer make calls in my house (used to get around 80% of full reception), my text messages would constantly fail, and my 3G connection was intermittent at best. The phone I picked up with T-Mobile is the BlackBerry Curve. It has wi-fi, but no GPS. Oh well, otherwise I love it. Next stop? Android.