Party like it's 2004

I'm supposed to be getting another cat. At least, Jeff Davis, when he finally came in to drop his paperwork off asked me if I wanted one. After much discussion, I decided it would be good idea to get a second one as it would give Diamond someone else to be attached to. She is rather overly fond of me.

However, when Jeff came by Monday he came without a cat, who evidently had gone outside on Sunday and not returned. The cat had belonged to his neighbor, who'd had their house foreclosed and who'd left, sans cat, figuring the Davis' would take care of him. They already have several and one more was not working well in the household.

The cat's name is Steve, or so I'm told, although that will likely change once I get to know him. Jeff tells me he's a brown tabby with white paws, which makes me lean toward calling him Kitty Deeds, a named I'd used on a similar looking feral I'd been trying to tame back in 2004. And that got me thinking about former Miracle player Dougie Deeds, which is where I got then name from.

Dougie spent the 2008 season with AA Tennessee after being traded to the Cubs during winter meetings and finished up the year batting .349. Kind of a step down from AAA Rochester but hey. We liked Dougie when was here, and we still miss him.

So one thing lead to another and I dug out the photo albums from 2004. All those pictures need to be scanned. I don't have them on CD. And with the exception of guys like Frankie Liriano, Scotty Baker and Nick Blackburn who've all gone to the majors, there's little reason to scrap book any of that year as they're certainly not going to be around to get autographs from. But...one thing sort of lead to another and I figured, well, I could do them for the website...

I discovered my scanner, which automatically scans stuff a 200 DPI, will actually scan up to 9600 DPI. I tried scanning to 1200 DPI, but it takes for freaking-ever to scan one little picture. So I've now settled on 600 DPI, which, if I'm working on 5 x 7 pieces should be fine, and not pixelate if I should happen to want to print them later for whatever reason.

Chaos Priestess has a new free Mini-Taggers kit called an Earthly-Air Romance which I rather like the colors in. (Miss Diamond will tell you "romance" is not a word that applies to me otherwise.) C.P. Designs does a lot on the black, white and gray theme, and I generally find her stuff useful.





The stars in the first piece are from Digital Chaos and available as a freebie element, as is the frame I used in the Matt Yeatman piece, which was done by Yarrow. C.P. Designs has a couple of frames that I've download, but they are in .PSD format and I've not felt like doing the work to convert them over. The brushed Metal Alpha is one I way over-use from Nettie B. Scrapz.

This next one of Matty uses the Eternity scrap kit which I've used on on a couple of pieces I've done in the past as well:



I snagged the little tag from Bluedreams Designs Earth kit.

Eternity and Gray Delight are two little kits from Chaos Priestess that I found came in really handy for scapping the Sara-Reds.

In the same color theme is Yarrow's Minutes to Midnight kit which I used on this one of Travis. In looking at it, I think I need to grayscale that picture and should probably go back and work on that.



Another one of Matty, using Helly's Could be Happy kit:



I rather miss Matty as well. There's some thing really attractive in watching something that BIG throw a ball.

One guy who is still around - but for how much longer? - is good ol' Eli Tintor. 2004 was his rookie year and it was also the year that Joe Mauer found the death zone in the Metrodome and tore up his knee. So we ended up using a number of catchers over the season, Tint was up for like 10 or 12 games in July.



This uses Dale Ann Cubbage's Boy Crazy kit (which Miguel describes as "fruity") and was done to a 12 x 12 format - standard scrapbook size.

Jose Morales is also still around - more or less - although he spent a good chunk of the season on the DL with AAA Rochester again.



This was done using the Satin Grunge kit from Tizzy's Angel, and is in 5 x 7 format.

Not around anymore is Ron Perodin...I used Yarrow's Gothique Violet add on for this one and have made a note to myself to buy the full version of the kit.



I did a few more I'm not really happy with (you can find them here if you really want to, so maybe I will redo them. (Although the J.T. would probably be okay if I sepia toned the picture.

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to spend the weekend scanning if I can convince Miss Diamond not to sit the scanner while I'm trying to use it.