Goodbye to Hi

For those curious, here's the short version of why we didn't have a Spring Training paper.  For those not curious, head after the jump.

Basically, my life has been a clusteryoucan'tsaythatwordonPurpleRow since mid-January, and things have come to a head recently.  The big and most recent piece is that my father recently suffered a stroke.  It was mild - he's only lost peripheral vision in one eye and some of his concentration skills have suffered (though he won't admit to that).  However, he's going to have heart surgery within the next couple of weeks.

A lot of the other issues have been me trying to help my girlfriend as best I can in her battle with a rather crippling anxiety disorder and depression.  Her parents aren't helping matters.  This, thrown on with my mom maybe possibly having breast cancer and me staring down the barrel of 33 pages worth of paper to write before the month is done...

If you have any spare thoughts, I'd appreciate them :) .  But this is why I haven't been around the Row lately (and why I missed the SABR league draft and why you don't have your logos yet, Jeff... I'm sorry!)

This is something I've thrown together in my recent spare time.  It was something I wanted to make time for because I feel it's an important piece of history for our Rockies.  Today marks the final spring training game at Hi Corbett Field.  When I think of baseball, I seldom think of "finals" - but today will see the final first pitch, the final 27 outs, and the final "Play ball!"  I felt we needed something to mark the occasion.

Slight bragging: everything you see in that badge/logo (save the Rockies and NL Championship logos, of course) was created by hand/mouse.  No shortcuts here, and I'm rather proud of how it turned out :) .  Turns out you can make a decently convincing sunset in Photoshop using nothing but 5 colors, gradients, and opacity settings.  Who knew?

Unfortunately, something went weird in the image sizing process, and the smaller resolutions have some artifacts on the top of their badges.  I'm not sure what happened, but I'll look into it for next time.

In addition to the regular wallpapers, I've thrown in a file of just the logo/badge on a transparent background, in case anyone wants to use it around the web/as their avatar.

And, of course, Go Rockies!

WIDESCREEN: 1920 x 1200 | 1680 x 1050 | 1440 x 900

STANDARD: 1600 x 1200 | 1400 x 1050 | 1280 x 960 | 1024 x 768 | 800 x 600

Just the logo