Friday, March 22, 2019

Spring is coming!

Hope springs eternal -- these will eventually be tomatoes...


Hey America!

Your food is getting soggy.

This is my home state of Nebraska.  No, sadly, it is not Photoshopped.  This is less than an hour's drive from my house.

Friday, March 15, 2019

Snow Day Pillow

I did this back in February, but I want my readers to know that I do still craft....

This is entirely from recycled materials.

We had a blue pillow that didn't match our living room decor.  Now it's been nicely hidden by the homemade pillow cover made from old T-shirts.

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Isabel was in a play!

This is from January, but I thought the blog could use a little cuteness.  :)


Sunday, March 10, 2019

Hope = Gardening

I hope for spring!

This is outside:

This is inside:

Yes, we started our seeds today for our smaller-than-usual-but-still-nice garden.  These are all tomatoes.... Amish Paste, Livingston's Paragon, some cherries tomatoes from my husband's late father that he harvests the seeds from every year, and some seeds from these odd, orange-colored cherry tomatoes from the store (thanks, Mom!).

(The grow lights are only on for the photo.  You don't need to turn the lights on until after the seeds germinate.)

Looking forward to playing in the dirt in a few months!

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Snow Day Fun - Game design

My husband had a cool idea for a game a few years ago.

He didn't do anything with it.

I started playing with the idea.  I made some cards with index cards (bad idea -- too big) and I've been happily playtesting.  (It helps that the game is designed for solo play, although it can also be multi-player.)

Today I went to www.thegamecrafter.com to do what my husband advised me to do weeks ago: check out prices and file formats for graphics.

The file formats for graphics isn't a problem.  I have a little sticker shock, though -- my initial design would be a $30 game, possibly more.

I'm trying to decide what I think about that.  (My initial thought is: make an initial deck of 108 cards instead of 300 and then do an expansion pack if the game is popular).  If it is just for me and just for fun, that's not a big deal.  But sharing the game with all of my nearest and dearest could get expensive, fast.

I'm also trying to decide about graphics. One of my husband's suggestions was to use The Game Crafter site to prototype the game, then see if I could get a manufacturer interested.  In that case, I just need placeholder graphics.  Nice ones would help, but really, let's face it, they would use their own graphic designers so stick figures would probably be quite adequate.  On the flip side, being able to draw would be good for my other art, and if this is a three-year project anyway.....