Dipping Into the Old Photos

I have been doing a little writing and gathering for a family project of sorts, so I thought I would post some of the recent photos that have become involved. Of course, some, if not all, have appeared in this blog in times past. Once I added the first five photos, I went on to add three more from times my past time.

This first photo wasn't really part of said project, but it has also come to my attention recently. Sue recently came across a piece of my maternal grandmother's embroidery and suggested that I put her picture with some info on the back. Me being me, I don't have a copy of the annotated photo that I made and printed, but here is the base photo.

Charlotte Ann was born in Eastern Ontario in 1880 and died in Montreal in 1949, two years after I was born, so I have no memory of her. Her framed embroidery still hangs on the wall of our spare bedroom.

I do remember her husband, my grandfather Quinlan. We lived with him until I was 7 years old. I am sitting with him and his dog Skippy on the front stairs of his house in Montreal.

Here I am with my dad and other grandpa, Rayner, in front of grampa's garden, maybe in 1952. We are dressed in suits and ties, so it almost had to have been taken after a Sunday dinner after church.

In the late 40s, my father was a lay preacher. I have this photo of him and my mother with a few from the little congregation in Gananoque, Ontario.

Now for a photo of Mom and me, from the late fifties, possibly 1958. Dad was also in the original of this Christmas photo, but I needed one of just mom and me from that time for the project, and it wasn't a good photo of him anyway.

While, I have not required the next photos for my project, I think I may as well as well go on. Phillis Croft was the longest living of my grandparents. She followed us when we moved from Montreal to Toronto, and for a number of years would spend the day at our place before returning to her rented room at night.

Which leads me to one more photo since it completes my whole family. My Uncle Charlie was a diminutive bachelor who only lived into his early fifties. I loved my little uncle with the good sense of humour.

On my wedding day, May 17 1969, my friend took a picture of my with my family before we headed to the church. Yes, everybody was there: the whole clan of four. We are not a much larger family almost 60 years later, there being just 6 of us. There could have been two more thought marriages, but those marriages did not pass the test of time.

Uncle Charlie, Mom, and Dad with me looming behind.

Bark Bark Bark

Apparently, this is how Jake carries on whenever I leave the house, and he simply does not stop. He'll stand near the door and carry on incessantly. Press play for a sample.

It was a bit of a learning experience to send Sue's phone files to my phone and from there to get them to my computer. After that, I merged the sound files with the still photo and uploaded to Blogger.

I don't why he does this, for we are not exactly bosom buddies. Sue and I usually go out together, but the one time that she left Jake with me, he did not carry on.

We continue our twice-daily walks. The morning stroll is often away from home as in the photo. The afternoon walk is frequently just up the street. Night walks have been abandoned. Dog is sent to the backyard ~8 o’clock and that's it until morning − very early in the morning I am sorry to say.

Sue and Jake on the nearby trail on one fine recent morning.

Sue made a collage to send to Jake's humans the dog is his various sleeping spots.

The Larches are Turning

I repeat this every year, but the last stage of autumn for us is the colouring of the larch trees. Larches are coniferous trees but not evergreen. They turn colour and drop their needles, and so they are also deciduous trees.

There are several larches in our local park, and I will undoubtedly post their progress over the next few weeks.

I think it is correct to call these trees tamaracks, and I usually prefer that name. All tamaracks are larches but not all larches are tamaracks.

The bench is nestled between two tamaracks. One of the trees has turned colour, but there are just tinges of yellow in the tree to the right of the bench.

From the bench there is another larch tree on the other side of the pond.

There are a few others in the park, and I am sure that I'll be back for more photos.

From the park we continued along the trail on a very nice day. As is the usual case, Jake met dogs. As is not the usual case, we spied a cat coming out of the background bush. I don't think we need to worry about it appearing form the wild bush, for it seems very well taken care of. Despite the wild background, there are houses that back onto the park just behind me as I snap this photo, and I am pretty confident that it belongs to one of them.

Now that I think about it, this may very well be the same cat that we met on the trail more that a year ago.

Caring and Sharing

It was Danica's reading week, so she spent it back home but mostly working with not much reading. She booked a little time to visit her grandparents who due to age and diminished capacity neglected to take any photos.

One thing we did do was to share our grocery card with her. If you recall, we won a $250 grocery card from our winter plow guys. What better use than sharing it with a college kid to help her stock up. There were also instructions to buy brother some treats too.

She hit the grocery store on her way out of town and sent the pictures that I asked for.

That left a hundred dollars for our use. We think that would make a nice donation to the food bank.

Oddly enough, on the same day Amazon Photos sent me a link of a slideshow of me and my girl. After much rigmarole, I think that I have embedded it here, but I did not find the process easy. I hope it actually plays for you, but I won't know until I press Publish.

Halloween Busyness

On Halloween Day, I looked out my den window and seemed to see neighbour’s garage open. The yard was full to overflowing, but were there more Halloween creatures inside? I had to go out and look. By golly there were.

the very busy yard and into the garage

I don’t think it would be possible to fit one more piece into that space.

the new garage addition this year

At the end of the Eve, he posted this photo of people milling around his display even after they had run out of treats, having only 234 pieces to offer, which is most neglectful.

Another local house said they ran out after giving out 300 treats. Meanwhile, others in town had few treaters; Shauna only has 12 come by her place  

For our first few years here, we tried our best for Halloween, but so many non-neighbours came to our townhouse street for a treat-grab that we gave up. We’d shutter the house and sit tight. When the grands came along, we would hand out treats at their place while the parents took the kids out. Then, it was back to being shuttered.

This year, I did purchase a box of 40 chip bags, of which we put 38 outside after commandeering 2 bags to accompany a sandwich lunch. The youngest kids were coming around before 6, so we rushed to get the box out. I don’t know exactly at what time the box became chip-less, but it didn’t last too long, so we shuttered again.

The next day, yesterday, neighbour already had most of the display down and was muttering something about his wife not allowing him to start on the Christmas display yet.

The Colour is Draining Away

On a recent walk along the bridge trail, this ↓ was the most colourful section. If this was most colourful, just imagine the rest of the trail. Dog managed to get into the photo. I'll leave him there and give a little update at the end.

You may recall that  I have already posted this park tree twice when it was in its glory, but by October 27, it has lost many leaves although it was still looking pretty wonderful. I shot wide angle which shows how bare most of the surrounding trees were.

Four days later, however, on October 31, it was so bereft of leaves that I could only see a few of them  from one of the angles, and they did not show up at all from the other side. Sigh.

Happily, there was another tree farther down the path that was still resplendent.

Back to Dog: We are halfway there now, and I can report that the nights are finally beginning to be better. We have been feeding him ~8, and he has been quiet until~6. Figuring he wasn't doing well in the dark downstairs, we had been keeping him up here, but as previously reported, it wasn't going well. He prefers to sleep downstairs, but previously had barking spells. Sue figured that a dog with dim vision may require some night light, so we have since kept some lights on down there, and it has gone much better. We shall see how it goes with the time change, but it is after 5am now, and he is still quiet down there.

Help Yourself if You Dare

All Hallows Eve has finally arrived, or at least the daytime part before the actual Eve is here. This will be my final Halloween post, for which Barbara R will be very grateful.

My neighbour finally completed his very busy display, from which I was able to extract two more subjects to set in different scenes. I tried something different with the ghost, and you shall see anon what Gemini gave me. BTW I do a little more processing of my AI results, darkening or lighting them to suit my taste, but AI sets the scene. Some ideas and requests work better than others, but it is really a one-shot deal unless one wishes to pay your way for extra, which I don’t  

In the first image, the ghost and two tombstones are from an original photo, the rest is AI's interpretation of a slummy, industrial area. As slummy as the case may be, it is a sacred site to Mr Ghost, for his corporeal days expired right there many years ago. As usual, I extracted the subject from the original photo and sent it to AI, in this case Gemini.

Place the subject in a bleak and dingy industrial scene at night with several overturned garbage cans and black cats on either side of the subject.

Neighbour also moved the clown to a spot where I could get a photo. I had the top half of the clown to work with. These were my instructions to ChatGPT.

Complete the bottom half of the subject clown and show it standing threateningly over a scared student in an old-fashioned, dimly-lit schoolroom in black and white, but keep the subject in colour. 

Finally, there must be treats on this day, so I ordered AI to fill the container which I found empty in D&D. Of course, in addition to the candy, everything else in the image, aside from the skull-like container itself, is AI-generated.

Take one if you dare, little darling.

For a personal record, I have uploaded to Facebook here most of the images that I have published on this blog in the past month or so.

It's been fun. After tonight, Bleak November begins and finding photos becomes more challenging, but there will still be small pockets of colour for just a little while longer, and, eventually, but hopefully not too soon, there will be snow. Oh yes, there will be snow and cold: much snow and cold.