Spasmed

I had a dental appointment for yesterday that I had on my calendar for a whole year. It was for 9am, but I phoned and cancelled at 8. 

I hate doing that, but as I explained to the receptionist, I didn’t know if I could get there and get onto the chair. Once in the chair, I wasn’t sure if I could stay there for the duration. Finally, I wasn’t at all confident that after an hour, I could get up and out again.

You see, I’ve had lower back muscle spasms for more than a week. I thought that they would surely be better by Monday morning, but if anything they were even worse. They aren’t exactly tickety-boo this morning either.  

Back spasms aren’t new to me. I’ve probably been getting one or two per year in the last decade. They are bad for a few days, but then they get better. This spasm bout isn’t as bad as some, but it is sure lasting longer.

I’ve given up on Dr Ho and Robax and so on. If time doesn’t soon begin to heal, I will hie myself thither to yon doctor. But they gotta get better soon, eh? This is getting ridiculous. 

More about Jake and also Charlotte

I think I have to plough (or plow) over old furrows this morning. I will bring you up to date on the Jake front, and with your indulgence, I need to get back the grandma and her embroidery one more time.

Jake

He visited me in my chair very briefly on Friday morning. When he first came to stay with us, he would spend time there with me in the chair but not lately. That day, as soon as I reclined the chair back, he left. If he is a little antsy at night, wanting treats or whatever, my chair going back seems to signal to him that I am done. At that point he usually leaves me alone, probably going down to sleep the night away.

  

And that it a very good thing — to sleep the night away. He's been doing that fairly regularly, something like 9 to 6 give or take 20 minutes here or there. I have even been the one to let him out the last three mornings. I have been up, so he's come into my room rather than rattling around Sue's room. If I am not already up, of course, I will not hear him, so Sue had been handling the lion's share of mornings and other times too. Specifically, she's been doing the walking recently while my back has been spasming. On one walk, Sue was able to use Jake and her umbrella to complete one of her photo prompts.

Grandma and Her Embroidery

I know, I know. I’ve gone over some of this twice already, but I redid that photo, or at least the font. It's clearer now.

And  . . . Sue had a photo of Grandma's three pieces of embroidery to pass on to me — of course, she did. My guess is that grandma did all three before she was married in 1913 and before becoming a mother several times over soon after that (see below). So, let us say that these peice are 120 years old and just leave it at that.

Here's a single photo of the one with the picture. I've made a guess, with Photoshop's help, to colour-correct it somewhat to reverse the yellowing from both the aging and the light, but who is to know.

Charlotte had four children after marrying in 1913. My mother was born in 1915 and my uncle Charlie in 1917. She then gave birth to twin girls in 1919. Ruth only survived for a few months from May 05 1919 to September 08 1919, but Ruby May lived to be almost 2 years old.

Following is what I have as a record for Ruby May. Sadly, aside from the dates, I have no actual record of Ruth's birth or death.

1919
Front: Charlotte Ann Robinson (Quinlan), Ruby May Quinlan
Back: Charles Peter Quinlan, Arthur Joseph Quinlan, Mary Elizabeth Quinlan (Rayner)

Two Unusual Images

Over a period of time, Sue was asked to take photos of various parts of herself dressed in various outfits and then combine them later. She took the photos and combined them in her own way, but I decided to see what I could do in Photoshop. I used a recent photo from the trail and then superimposed the various clothing images, including one of her head.

The boots and pants went well enough, and the head isn't too bad, but I couldn't make the top fit as well as I would have liked.

Sue had taken photos from various positions and focal lengths. I hope her group does a similar project next year because we will know to take the four photos using a similar pose and focal length. It was interesting to try to put it together like this, however.

Then for something very different, while poking around on FB, the app showed a base photo of me and asked if I wanted FB (Muse) to make a poster. Well, why not? I am often in a fog, so to speak. 

I didn't know that I was about to become a star in a movie, but here we are. I had no input into this creation. The app just did what it did.

Oh my goodness, it just offered to make another. What⁉️ It sees me as old⁉️

I will not keep doing this, but I wanted to see what the app would come up with. lol

Gomez and Grandma Again

Sue and I indulge ourselves with coffee out, probably too often. It is always plain coffee, and a drive through Tim Hortons is a reasonably inexpensive $4.83 (tax included) for 2 large. But when this ↓ came up on Facebook from our other favourite cafe, Dark & Deadly, with a Movember fundraiser included, we couldn't resist.

Gomez

Our Gomezes

The book is for signing if you so wish, but no one bothers or at least hasn't for quite some time.

It was quite yummy, but by the time we got to the bottom, it was seeming to be too sweet. It was a special treat, but we can purchase three rounds of coffee at Tim Hortons for the same cost, and we enjoy them very much.

Oh, I found a version of the annotated photo of my grandmother that I posted about yesterday. Except the font makes it difficult to read. I may have to reprint the image some day. I have reposted the text below for now for your elucidation.

Charlotte was born in Glengarry County on March 11 1880.

She married Arthur Joseph Quinlan in 1913, and gave birth to

Mary Elizabeth Quinlan in 1915. Charlotte died

in Montreal on December 21 1949

And Barbara wanted a photo of grandma's embroidery. My mother had this one framed a long time ago, and it has been hanging in our spare room for all of our 21 years here. Sue also found another piece, but it is somewhere out of sight for the moment.

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.

The Greeter and the Altar

Yesterday, we followed the Lady in Red from one haunt to another. As I mentioned, she is one of the characters in the Dark and Deadly Cafe. There is another character who wanted to get out of the coffee shop for awhile, so I took him to the haunted house that actually exists on the lake just outside of town where he found temporary employment as a greeter.

Yes, both the house  and the character exist; this was not an AI set.

Also from D&D, a sweet lil doll.

I also previously showed you the devilish altar outside of neighbours house, but I did not show this version of it that I relocated to just outside the gates of heck.

Relax. That is most certainly AI, except for the actual altar, of course.

We're almost there to the Eve, folks, and I am afraid that the good times will have to stop after tomorrow.

But we do have tomorrow, and I'll see you then for a final Halloween Hurrah

Lady in Red

The Lady in Red usually looms inside the Dark & Deadly Cafe, but she likes to get out every now and then, and I like to help her 

Sometime ago, I took her to an old residence to meet her former friends, and I got a shot of her standing by the door and looking very pretty. Apparently, there was a lot more red inside before the night was over.

On one recent night, and I went for a walk with Dog. Red Lady met us outside her cafe in her usual, cheerful and friendly manner. She invited us inside but Dog had more bushes to visit, so we demurred.

On another late walk with Dog, the lady was strolling along the path in the park. She waved for us to join her, but Dog turned tail, and I don't understand why. I was certainly ready to meet her and maybe even have a little dance.

I could have brought her forward in that last photo, but it wasn't worth the extra effort.

Three Weeks In

We are completing our third week with Dog Jake with four more weeks to go. It is time to report on how it’s going  

We are doing lots of walkies with him. We usually take him our mid-morning for a longish walk. By that, I don't mean that we trudge for miles, but we go a little farther than up street and back. The photos in this post are from the day that we walked around to the near park where Sue took more bench photos  

Daytime goes well enough, at least it does once we all up after feeding the beast at 6 or earlier  

The thing is that Dog wants both of us up. So, even if Sue is up first and trying to let me sleep, or vice versa, he will usually find a way to bark the other human awake. After that job is done, he'll go to sleep leaving both humans bright-eyed and bushy-tailed dragging their sorry and bewildered selves about. 

It's to the point where sleeping in until 6 is the goal that eludes us. He is supposed to have his breakfast then, but he's generally up earlier. I take him downstairs and open the back door, but he reneges. So, I lift him up and carry him down the deck into the back yard. I have flashlight in hand and use it to try to highlight the stairs so that he navigate his way back to the house, for doggy doesn't see well.

You get the fact that I (or Sue) have been outside and carrying Dog before 6 in the morning when it is dark and sometimes below freezing and sometimes wet?!

He comes in and gets fed. It takes about three seconds for him to inhale his food. Then, he expects treat rewards for being such a wonderful and clever boy. I give him one treat downstairs, and then he wants another upstairs (they're very small). Unfortunately, he wants more, which he doesn't usually get, and also, he then wants the second human up assuming that second human is still abed, which isn’t always the case as I have previously mentioned. It is difficult for second human to continue to sleep given dog's piercing bark.

As for walkies, we are still working them out. We have a pre-supper walk, usually up the street and back. We eat at 6, and Jake gets fed at 7. Sue goes to bed around 9, and sometime after that I been taking Jake to walk #3. It is pretty late on some nights, and we have gone long on some of those nights.

It's all to tire him out, so we can all sleep during the night. But as I compose this, I have not even managed my meagre 5 hours for 5 consecutive nights. It seems like the night walk may be having the reverse effect of waking him up and is getting him revved up.

The night after he woke up poor Sue at 4 in the morning, I decided to set an alarm on my watch for 5am. Sue needs her sleep more that I, and she was kind of burning the candle at both ends. Recently, he has been sleeping until a little after 5, and I have been awake enough to take him down to at least give Sue another hour. we had only one morning when I was able to keep him quiet, and let Sue sleep until 7. That was good, but it was only one day.

So, that is how it is going, three weeks into this gig.

I will leave you with a composite that Sue made combining both bench photoshoots with a third bench added for good measure.

 

happiness is a walk in the park

I posted this photo last week. It was taken on a dull day, but I still liked how the colour sat in the frame  

Our Sunday morning walk took us back to the park. It was a brighter day, and the tree called to me again although it was also evident that the tree had lost more leaves. I never know which focal distance I will like best once I see them on the big screen, so I often take several photos at different focal lengths. 

My focal preference changes from one shoot to another, but in this case, I like the 4x zoom the best although I probably should have taken another 4x shot from the spot where I took the 2x shot, without the other tree trunk in the way, but somehow I like it better with the tree in front. Go figure.

I do like the other two, though, but I wonder what dear reader may think. 

normal focal length

4x zoom
my fave of the three
among other things I think the orange leaves are highlighted best in this one

2x zoom

On the same walk, Sue was looking for bench photos for a prompt and took a few of Jake and me on a nearby bench.

Then, she took a selfie.

I guess, happiness is a walk in the park on an autumn day.