Wed., April 20th, 2011 Getting Organized

Kelsey, Angie, and Supervising Teacher Luis Downtown for Dinner Out

This morning I went out looking to buy flowers for Kelsey's teacher mentor and supervisors and their wives.  They had invited us out for dinner at 5 PM downtown at the fancy Spring Brook Road shopping area with a pedestrian mall.   They were going to take us to a Japanese Hotpot restaurant because it would offer a less spicy version of the famous local dish and had a lot of vegetarian choices. After a nice dinner we walked around the most amazing glitzy pedestrian street and shopping mall.  It is fancier than anything I have seen in Canada with many beautiful shops, giant TV screens and beautiful paving.   

Gerbera Daisies

Looking for flowers in the morning I walked around the corner regional tourist bus station to Xinnan St. and headed south a few blocks and then turned left.  On the side street I saw a little shop.  I tried gesturing to the proprietor to enquire about price but he could not understand what I was getting at.  Finally I remembered my little Chinese phrase book in my purse and was so happy when I found "how much does this cost".  He laughed and was happy and wrote down 30 yuan and so I picked up two very lovely bouquets for less than $5 each.  One was filled with carnations and the other had brilliant gerbera daisies. 

When I returned to my room I decided I had to tackle my photo imaging problems as it is very difficult to deal with my pictures to paint or for this blog  lacking photo imaging soft ware. On browsing the web I discovered Photoscape at http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php.  I downloaded their software and voila--all of my problems are solved. Tomorrow I can happily work on the painting of  the cropped image of my peach blossoms without wasting half my time returning the computer view of the photo to the proper screen size.