More Bad News and Procrastination

My dad did not beat lung cancer. He passed away in August 2014, 14 months after my mom's passing and two years since he was diagnosed.

Those two years were the roughest I have ever experienced.

So, even though 2015 should have been the year to follow up on recovering the funky hard drive on my XP laptop, I fell to depression and inertia. I couldn't even write in any of my blogs until January of this year.

I've thought about the graphics and the website often. I really need to update a lot of things. But the new website builder software I bought is too different from what I was using. I don't have the necessary ability to concentrate and to be patient with myself to learn something new right now.

Excuses, excuses! Yup.

I really miss my parents...

An Update

Well, I'm back home but the news is still not completely upbeat.

I lost my mom to heart failure in late June, about a month after I returned to my own home. I don't think anyone, even she, knew how terribly weak her heart really was, despite having a triple quintuple bypass, replacement of the mitral valve, and placement of a pacemaker with a defibrillator in late March.

My dad is surviving, so far, with chemo treatments. Although my dad getting cancer was a shock considering he stopped smoking regularly over 40 years ago, we're hoping that because of that his chances are good he'll go into remission.

My computer: Haven't taken it to a pro yet. The big decision is should I take it to techs at a place like Best Buy or Fry's Electronics or to a small, independent shop? Should I trust opinions at Yelp for this?

Everything was put on hold in December and stayed that way.

(Edited 8/7/2019 to correct an adjective.)

Where Have I Been?

Repeat visitors to Arride Graphics may have noted that there hasn't been any new graphics offered since March 2012 or so. There are two main reasons for that.

First, my main computer's hard drive crashed in April 2012, and try as I might I could not revive it. I decided to leave that task to the professionals but I never got around to doing that. In the meantime I bought another computer. Unfortunately, the new computer has a different OS so I could not load my most-used programs onto it.

Second, late in 2012 my father was diagnosed with cancer. In trying to cope with that situation my mother ended up stressing her heart out and was hospitalized a number of times with congestive heart failure. Enter me. By late December I was staying with my parents to help my sister, who lives close-by, run our parents' household and take care of them and their dogs. I've been at my parents' house off-and-on since late December and continuously since mid-March. My mom finally got the open heart surgery she needed and is now recovering very well.

I'm hoping by the end of this month I'll be able to return home and take care of all or most of the deferred work I have waiting for me. I thank my husband, Mike, for being so understanding and helpful during the last, almost six months.

A Glitch

Wondering what happened to me and Arride Graphics? Well, I've been around but agonizing and procrastinating over the loss of use of my primary computer where my graphics, webpage builder and websites are stored. I had no backup for the graphics and sites either "in the cloud" or an external hard drive. Bad move.

So when my hard drive crashed, I was left with very little. I tried resolving the problem myself, but I think it's beyond my capabilities and patience. I'll have to turn it over to the pros. In the meantime, I got a new notebook 'puter with which to start from scratch. Frankly, I'd rather play online games than think about trying to reproduce everything in this new 'puter.

But and so: But I want to continue making web graphics and desktop wallpapers for Arride Graphics. So, after I get the procrastinating bug out of MY system, I'll try to see if the downed computer can be fixed, if not at least recover the files contained regardless of monetary cost.

Also, I bought a new webpage builder which means a new learning curve to deal with, so that's another hurdle. Thus, you may or may not see new stuff in the coming months and the new site remodel I mentioned last year.

Thanks for reading this blog and for your patience.

Happy New Year!

I resolve to do a lot of "house-cleaning" this year. As I mentioned last year there are some small changes coming to this site. I intend to work on it all year, though, hopefully it won't actually last that long.

In the meantime, here is a desktop wallpaper (out of a couple or so I'd promised late last year.) 

I don't know what it is but soon after winter sets in I'm thinking about the warm summer weather. When I was looking for starter material for a desktop wallpaper I was looking at fall and winter themes. But I got tired of feeling so cold and was wishing for warmer weather. (In my neck of the "woods" we're really in a rain drought and do need the rains and snows.)

Going through the downloads from morguefile.com I found this photo of shells on a beach taken by veggiegretz. It's different from the other beach photo I used for another desktop wallpaper so it was perfect. Using Corel Painter Photo Essentials, I tried out a variety of paint effects. The watercolor effect kept it light and airy so that's the one used for this wallpaper.

Go now to the 5th desktop wallpapers page to find this summery image for your computer. It comes in six resolutions from 640x480 to 1440x1080.

New Desktop Wallpaper: Bleeding Hearts

Despite seeing double right now, I managed to put together a new desktop wallpaper for you. In fact, I'm using it myself because I'm wishing for spring to come sooner than later. It is also appropriate to display for Valentine's Day!

The original photograph for the desktop wallpaper comes from morguefile.com and was created by a member called westminister. It's an image of the pretty flower called bleeding hearts. The drooping pink-and-white flowers do look like hearts.

What I did was surround the flowers with a nice frame, creating a dreamy image. Then the image was re-sized to six resolution sizes. All done with Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.

Go to Wallpapers 5 to find the thumbnail image and download links. And remember, these graphics are for your computer's desktop, not for web pages!

Webpage Background: RGB Side

Today's offering is a webpage background graphic featuring a left side border of small blocks in red, green and blue, thus the name of "RGB." After I created the Color Block backgrounds in June I thought about other colors than pastels that I could make backgrounds out of. I came up with this, which are the three basic colors of the original CRT color monitors.

Plain and functional. That's what this background graphic is. If you like it after viewing the sample page, download the graphic to your hard drive following the directions on the page. You'll find the thumbnail image on page 5 of the side border backgrounds page. Just follow the log-in instructions.