Ida Clare: Ida Clare, That's a Good One!

Ida Clare, It’s Friday.

Don’t you just love the promise of Friday? It’s the end of the week, the beginning of the weekend and there is a tall, cool and handsome margarita in my future.

I am excited because I did some digital art yesterday and (as they say here in Big Thicket) it’s a good-en. What? Don't you know what a good-en is?

Maybe I could start a Big Thicket Word of the Day Email Service just like Dictionary DotCom to clear up some of the words that are creeping into my vocabulary like mold in the shower stall. I try to keep it clean but first thing you know, I’ve slipped up and broken my vow to speak the English I spoke before I arrived here.

Word of the Day for Friday, March 8, 2013

Good-en [goo d~`uhn], noun and adjective conveniently rolled into one handy word.

East Texas Speak. Word muttered to keep from having to actually use facial muscles to speak when indicating excellence. Also helps to prevent showing real enthusiasm for the subject because if someone here thinks you like something really well, they will steal it, kill it or sleep with it.
Hollywood. Good-en should not be confused with the actor’s name, John Goodman who portrayed Rose Ann’s husband on the show Rose Ann even though they sound exactly the same.

The intensity of the atmosphere in the mobile home’s living room relaxed considerably when Marshall declared the 72” television to be a good-en. --Confessions of an East Texas Madam, 2011

We were all glad to see that Mr. Gooden had lost some weight because we don’t want anything to happen to him cause as an actor, he’s a good-en. –Gossip column in the Big Thicket Gazette, 2012

(Is the opposite of a good-en, a bad-en?) Oh dear, I’ve already been here too long because I can use bad-en in a sentence: We saw a buggy wreck on Aisle 12 at the Wal-mart and it was a bad-en. If that sentence makes sense to you, your ear for languages is a good-en.

Ok, now that’s out of my system I am going to share the name of my new digital best friend, www.picmonkey.com a free photo editing website. Let me be clear, there are parts you can’t use unless you upgrade to their paid royal service, but you can do a lot here that will make your photographs look like you know how to operate your camera. I took a photography class and I still don’t know what half the stuff on my camera means, but it’s Friday, so I’m not going to complain.

Picmonkey’s tagline is “Easy, fast, fearless, photo embetterment,” which makes one wonder if these monkeys hail from this part of the country, but don’t hold that against them. They got game. If you don’t have Photoshop, you will appreciate this website. If you do and are intimidated every time you load the program like me, you are going to appreciate it even more.

You can do all the basics like crop and resize and remove the red-eye of your family members who happen to be vampires and were trying to keep it quiet until your camera outted them. Picmonkey can even whiten their fangs and give them a nip and tuck.

The real fun you can have is making some digital art by using textures and effects or if you are feeing evil, a mustache on your grandma. The possibilities are endless and will make you look smart and creative or at least like a person who has way too much time on your hands. They do have a help section that is at the bottom of the very front page but I haven’t seen a way to access it when you actually need it. Just give it a try and see what you think. Here is a before and after photo I did with this nifty little program. I would have probably deleted this photo, so it's worth it to take a second look at some of those rejects.