Great Grandpa the Cobbler

Since you don't seem to mind my fascination with old family photos, I thought I'd add this one to the collection. I've posted Israel's photo before, standing in front of his house, but I like this one of him doing his thing — cobbling. You can see a boot on the floor.

There are notes on the back of the photo. I didn't know they were there because I had never removed it from the album before. I may never do it again either because it's more like paper than photo paper. He was born in Glen Roberston, died in Cashion's Glen at age 87 in 1922. He was the father of Willie, Mamie, Bertha, Charlotte (my grandmother), David, Donald, and George (2). I think that means that there were two George's, the one that died and another one. I now think that the one in the photo that I showed before must be George 2 who lived.

I have heard of the women Bertha, Charlotte, and Mamie but not very much of the men except maybe for Willie because I remember my mother referring to an Uncle Will. Other notes in the album inform that he was buried in Martintown. I went loking for tombstones in Glen Robertson once but wasn't aware of Cashion's Glen or Martintown at the time.

The version below represent my attempt at restoration. I've cropped away the missing corner, adjusted tonality somewhat, and removed some scratches.

Playing with Photoshop

Here are five renditions of one photo from The Mill of Kintail. The first is the original, unretouched version.



The next one has my usual adjustments that better reflect what I'd like the photo to look like. I tend to saturate the colours a lot in these drab winter photos.



This is the same as above but highly sharpened. Look how much sharper the tree branches are: perhaps too much, but it was an experiment with highpass sharpening.



Sometimes, a young fella just wants to play around and see what pops up on the screen after applying a filters at random (next two photos).

Commenting on Commenting ... Sort of

I guess it was back in 1994 that I first went online. At first, my access was via a teacher network and, therefore, limited. When I did get in, it was using a browser (and I use that word lightly) that did not support graphics. I had my first email account with that teacher network. Heady stuff: but access through them was neither reliable nor comprehensive, so I soon found my first, true Internet Service Provider and began browsing, first with Netscape and then with an early version of Internet Explorer.

In those days, my ISP limited me to one email account. Web-based accounts weren't terribly available then, but I didn't really need more than one account until other family members decided that they wanted to get online too. It was a problem, and I'm not too sure how we solved it. Maybe I really had two email accounts? Eventually, I switched providers for an outfit who would provide five accounts, and that served did us quite well, and if that wasn't enough, I later got my own web site, which provided me with up to 50 accounts.

Later on I tried web-based email accounts with hotmail and yahoo and another outfit. I could never quite commit to web-based email, however, until Google's gmail came along. They supply tons of space, so that you never have to toss a letter if you don't want to, and they are very reliable.

Gmail is so good at trapping that dreaded s**m that I almost welcome it. I think of the money and time that the miscreants are spending on me to absolutely no avail. It goes into a separate folder, which I can clean out manually or let Google empty after thirty days. I prefer to do it myself on a daily basis, but I after checking for months and finding no mistakes, I seldom bother to do more than cast a most fleeting glance at the s**mbox before I tell gmail to delete it all. On rare occasions, I confess that the odd, unsolicited email makes it past their filters into my Inbox, but it occurs very infrequently.

It's not just gmail that works well now; those other alternatives that I mentioned are great too. One could consider them to be disposable accounts. If you didn't like the mail you were getting (if the junk were to get through), you could easily delete the account and get a different one.

You see, I am wishing that y'all would all file an email address with Blogger. That would make it easy to reply to comments. Sometimes, I get questions, and I begin to write a reply, only to find out that no email address has been provided. The email-ripping-people can't easily get your addresses from Blogger because they seem to be protected from bots in some way. So, the address that I publicize on Blogger actually gets much less s**m than the address that I have tried to keep more secret. Go figure.

However, human nature being what it is, most people will keep hiding their email address in their attempts to drive me completely crazy. I really don't have far to go, y'know? :) So, I think that I'll actually begin to do what some of you already do; if a comment requires follow-up (ie. a question) I shall try to answer it in my comment section if an email address isn't provided. I think it rather cumbersome and almost the only thing that I really don't like about Blogger, but that seems to be what people prefer, so who am little ole me to buck the trend any longer?

With that in mind, I have made some follow-up comments to each of my previous four posts. It's not always necessary to comment back (thank goodness) but for now I'll give it a try when it seems to be appropriate. Meanwhile, if you're interested in gmail, you need an invitation to get a free account. It so happens that if you write to me, I can provide you with one, and you'll be onto a better form of email in no time flat. My email address is not hard to find; just look at the top of the sidebar. Will ya?

A Winter Walk?

... ya gotta be kidding. Right? No, I'm not kidding.

On a sunny January afternoon, at least it was sunny to begin with, we drove ourselves to the Mill of Kintail for a winter stroll. There are walking trails at The Mill, and last autumn we had thought that it would be wonderful to explore some of them on snowshoes this winter. Hah! As you can plainly see in some of the pictures below, there is no snow. There is mud in places, however. The ground is frozen enough to prevent drainage when the surface melts, so the going became a little difficult at times.

El Nino is having its way with us this year, bringing winds and snows to the west coast and balmy-ness (or is it barmy-ness?) to Eastern Canada. Various places in the Ottawa Valley broke temperature records the other day, some localities by several degrees. I don't know if this year's weather is attributable to global warming or not because El Ninos have been occurring for a long time, probably forever from the human point of reference. I do know, however, that they now occur more frequently and that the results are probably more virulent.

I am reading some blogs where people have seen the Al Gore video, An Inconvenient Truth. Eyes are being opened, and that's wonderful. I used to teach world issues, and environmental issues were part of the curriculum, so it isn't as newsy to me as it is to some. However, I think that Mr Gore is doing a wonderful thing by educating all sorts of people about this problem. In my comments on one blog, I wondered how different the world would be had he been allowed the win that election. Sigh.

At some point in time, I heard someone say that when the Americans get it, they'll really get it and things will happen. I hope so. This world desperately needs some very positive USA leadership in this area.

Small but Great

I'm trying valiantly to get back to being more productive after the foofaraw of the Christmas season. Hence the photo. This is a somewhat adjusted version. I worked on it tonight, but it's still not very good. The original is here on Flickr if you're interested.



I think it was taken in 1919 near Montreal. The squinting girl on the right is my mother, the curly-haired boy my uncle. The baby, Ruby May, didn't make it. By the time this picture was taken, her twin sister, Ruth, had already died, probably just before this photo was taken. Ruby lived for the best part of another two years, succumbing in July 1921. Those were hard days.

These early deaths are part of the reason why my family is so small. Also, my Uncle Charlie (the boy in the photo) didn't marry and died in his fifties: not only that, but my father was an only child, and so am I. Sheesh! There are some relatives but I'm not close to any of them — either in terms of geography or relationship. I think more and more families are like that nowadays, but we're smaller than most.

However, more than once I have said: "We're a small family but a great family."

New Years Eve

Moving back the kitchen table and line dancing.



Group Photo



The Old Anvilcloud with Young BenMar.



A Walk Down the Old Logging Trail earlier in the day with BIL and his new pup, Elu.

My Top Ten of 2006

I am stealing and modifying this idea/meme from Eric at The Electronic Firefly. Considering the three headings, it may not look like a list of ten, but I think it can be broken down that way. I see four items under music, three under baby, and at least three more under Arizona. It simply suits me more to exposit rather than to itemize and list.

 

Smudge

One day last July, we drove Butterfly to the fertility clinic in Ottawa. On the way we spied a bunny (or were there several – I can't recall exactly and it doesn't matter). Thinking of the reproductive capacity of rabbits, I somewhat but not altogether jokingly remarked that it must be a positive omen. Several weeks later, Butterfly gave us a little gift; I opened the bag to find two baby booties inside.

We were told that it was early days, "So don't get too excited." Hah! As if we could help it. I decided that I would get excited and would deal with the disappointment later if all did not turn out well. Mother-to-be is now in her fifth month, and I still hold to the same philosophy. I can't imagine not being excited.

My excitement mounts higher when I see little Smudge's ultrasound pictures or hear her (we think she's a she) strong heartbeat on the monitor, or see the increasing visible evidence as Mom begins to round out perceptibly as it does in this most recent picture. All of a sudden, she's really looking as though she's with child, and I look even more forward to being enchanted in April.

 

Music

One day last summer, I sat on a hillside in nearby Almonte listening to a Celtic music concert. The weather was splendid, warm and sunny but not overly hot. As the day wore on and the music continued to roll over us and through us, I thought, "This would never happen in Sarnia." It was then that I realized that I was at home: home in a way that I never was in Sarnia.

It's a musical area. I guess there's lots of modern, urban stuff in nearby Ottawa, but there's also a lot of old time fiddlin in The Valley. Finding the Celtic Jam in tiny Middleville was a case in point. As I said, however, there's all kinds of music around and about inclduing the rather major Country Fest that Cuppa and I volunteered at this summer. While I'm not a huge fan of country, I don't particularly mind it, and working guard duty for much of the weekend was a positive experience. And I musn't forget how Cape Breton Live packed out the auditorium twice in a last minute event that hadn't even been scheduled. Remarkable.

It must have all inspired me in some way because I soon found myself renting a violin, then beginning lessons, and finally buying my very own instrument. Actually, it wasn't really a new idea; taking up the fiddle was something that I had placed on the backburner of my mind several years ago. Somehow, surrounded by all of the music this year, it seemed to be the right time and place to move it from the backburner to the hotter front burner.

 

Arizona

Time passes quickly, and late in 2005, Cuppa and I realized that it had been quite a while since we had been on a trip. Arizona and the Grand Canyon seemed to be calling, so we began to make arrangements and ended up flying from Ottawa to Phoenix via Toronto late in April. (It seems that good things happen in April.)

We rented a car and headed to Flagstaff which became our base camp for four days. From there we made day trips to the Grand Canyon and Sedona. Later in the week we drove to Monument Valley where we took a private three hour tour with a Navajo guide. Without doubt, it was the highlight of the week. By saying that, I don't diminish the other sites, including the next and final one, Canyon de Chelly, where we walked in this desert valley for three hours with an old Navajo guide and a young British couple. It turned out that both the old guide and the young couple could leave us in the dust. Well, they could have but they were kind, and we had a great time.

A real highlight of the trip was meeting our first bloggers ever: Paul and Julie in Flagstaff, and Dale and Chelsea in Phoenix. Based on this experience, I highly recommend meeting fellow bloggers. They were (and still are, I'm sure) wonderful, warm, friendly people. In fact, maybe meeting these folk was even better than Monument Valley. Hmmm.

I'm sure that I could add to this list if I were to ponder longer, but I must resist the temptation and give you fine folk a break, not to mention my easily over-taxed brain.