Valley Contrasts

I found myself in an old photo folder from 2006, looking for a specific photo for a specific reason. Having done what I needed to do, I re-edited a few, or re-edited them for the first time, having passed over them back then. Back then, I was on the cusp of learning more about photography, and the photos were not good quality, but it was a special trip, so one does what can.

This was at a stop on our native-guided jeep tour. We were importuned to purchase a necklace from a young Navajo boy who claimed to be selling it to help raise money for his older brother to go on a field trip.

Although those were the photos that I wanted, I fooled around with the few more, once again, mostly ones that I had overlooked previously. This was from one of our stops, and that is Sue way down near the bottom left. Our tour guide is talking to another tour guide on the lower right. After doing the normal colour version, I also wondered how it would look in mono.

Just two more: (1) a monument seen through a gap, and (2) trees in the desert.

I enjoyed working through some of these old photos and being reminded of this special tour, but by nightfall here, we were in our first major storm of the season. Maybe I will go and take some quick phone pics out the window in the 6AM darkness.

The phone brightened this photo out the back window. That's our poor lilac bush being bowed low in the foreground and the daycare centre in the back. It may not be as busy this Friday with buses cancelled and more adults staying at home. In between lies a normally busy road. It will probably still get its fair share of traffic today, for the show must go on.

From my den looking out front, I can see just beyond the garage that our driveway has been plowed but that the town plows have pushed a snow ridge back in front of our access. It doesn't matter since our contractor is good about coming back and also because we don't need to go anywhere. One bloke (mid left) is already shovelling-out to get to wherever he has to get to.

The plows will remain busy for another day because this storm is going to keep on.

Quite a contrast between Monument Valley and the Ottawa Valley.

That Was Not a Party

After a weird night in which almost everything that could happen did happen, I will try my best to compose a post, especially since I missed yesterday. I like to miss on occasion. I makes me feel as though I am the master of the medium and not the slave of it. 

Without going into detail, I ranged temperatures from too cold to too darn hot, during and around which I experienced cramps both front and back. The one requires ice while I apply heat to the other. A great time was had by all me no one.

. . .  And I have just decided that rather that try to compose the topic that is on my mind, I will just give up and return at a later time.

Should I live that long. 

Pop Goes the AC

We order-in pizza about once a month. That is more frequent than it used to be, but we haven’t gone out as much since COVID (not that we were ever exactly gadabouts). During those early pandemic times, we did try ordering other meals via delivery, but we weren’t enthralled with the fare. Orders would get mixed up or come cold or whatever. Pizza has been reliable for us.

Ours comes with pop. There is no question about this. Ya gotta take your free pop. The app won’t me skip past this requirement  

Last month I chose orange. We still have it in the fridge. This month I chose cream soda. I wonder how long we’ll have that. I could order Pepsi, but I usually have my preferred Coke on hand, so it seems pointless.

Except for the very very occasional ginger ale, Sue doesn’t drink pop. While I do, it’s usually just Diet Coke. It feels good on my poor throat, but other soft drinks don’t seem to have the same effect.

Soft drinks have always appealed to me. I probably used them more when I drank neither coffee nor tea. While the normal world was getting their morning caffeine hit from coffee, I would get it from cola. Currently, I tend to open three cold cans per day because the cola makes my throat feel so good for some reason. I try to limit myself to only a half can at a time — sometimes less, sometimes more, but that’s a fair average.

I know that colas are not exactly a health food drink, but I figure that consuming only 1.5 cans per day isn’t too terrible, and I don't always drink even that much.

The foregoing palaver is all background to the memory that the above red cream soda evoked.

I was five or thereabouts and had tasted cream soda before, but it had come as a clear liquid. One day, I saw that someone had tossed a bottle containing a red solution on the front lawn. I couldn’t read then and didn’t know exactly what it was, but I could see that it was a soft drink. Besides that, red was favourite colour, so I figured that it had to be good. Excitedly, I brought it into Mom who did the taste test before passing the bottle to me.

I have another memory of Mom and soft drinks. We didn’t go with my father to church on Sunday evenings. It was almost an hour bus ride away, so Mom kept me home so that I would be perky for school. I don't know that it ever worked, but she tried her best. 

We’d often go for a walk on those evenings and would sometimes buy a bottle of Kik Cola to bring home as a treat, Kik being a local beverage company that is probably since long extinct.

Those are two early memories of my association with soft drinks. I don’t love them quite so much anymore, but there is still that throat issue that feels a little bit better with an ice cold Diet Coke passing over it.

Nostalgia

I really didn't intend to post today, but when I came across this image, I had the urge to share.

This seems anachronistic to me because I doubt that too many people under the age of 70 have experienced this predicament.

We had two sets of lights when I was  a boy. Neither were extremely long, the shortest perhaps only 12 - 18 bulbs. Fortunately, it was this shorter one that was of this ilk. If one light burned out, and they did do this, we had to get a good bulb from the storage pile, remove one bulb from the string, and insert the good one. If the whole string remained unlit, we would then reverse the move and repeat the procedure with the next bulb.

They were special bulbs that were a bit crinkly in a tired and the strand was stored in a worn out box. I assume that they became unavailable over time. My recollection is that we no longer had or used them by the early 1960s.

As irritating as it was back then, being reminded by this image this morning, I am left feeling a tiny bit nostalgic with memories of decorating the tree with Mom and Dad in our little, one-bedroom, upstairs flat in Montreal.

The Yearly Alphabet

Every now and then, Sue's photo group asks for photos somehow incorporating two letters. Once they got into December, they had done the whole alphabet. It is then that members assemble a collage of their entire alphabet. The neato auto generated collages that we have access to, seemed to stop at a grid of 9 which would hardly suffice.

In Photoshop, I made an 8x8" square, and then marked it up so that I would have 25 squares (more about 25 later). I made 2" squares with 0.25" between them for margins. Then, I inserted Sue's photos into the squares, sometimes reconfiguring them into a square from the original rectangle that Sue had originally posted. 

(I did upload a large version in case anyone needed to click to see it, but I think this work well enough.)

The discerning might ask why I made the grid with 25 squares and not 26.

Basically, it is because I lose my mind from time to time. Other than that, there is no answer. You would think that if I could design and fill a somewhat difficult layout, that I could have made a square for each letter, but you would think wrong. 😕

Since I was, apparently, unable to count to 26, I combined the last 8 letters into 4 squares, and this also left me with enough room for a title and attribution. Actually, Sue had herself done this in her presentation to the group, so it was easy enough.

If we do this next year, I promise to count to 26, but y'know, I have been out of school for a long time, so . . .

Caturday 44: Lacey is Appalled

Lacey eats a tin of Fancy Feast every day: always a seafood pâté style. It took us years to figure out that this was her preference, but she continues to pretty well clean her plate rather than leave large bits of other food.

However, I was gobsmacked  by the price increase. One week, the price was $1:19; the next week it was $1:49. 

That is a 25% increase ladies and gents — in one freakin week!

Not only that but until last week they were on 10/$10, but that deal is gone. Looking at it that way, it is a 49% increase, also in one freakin week!

This isn't inflation. This is greedflation or gougeflation!

I tried to get Lacey to eat a cheaper food. This was was her reaction.

Printing Enjoyment

You will likely recall that I no longer display my prints after recently taking them down from the hair salon and donating them to the women's interval home. I don't know what has become of them, but that's okay.

Part of the reason has been the degradation of my printer which continues to put down splotches in the margins. I can't sell prints like that.

But I still like to print for myself although I haven't done it very often for about three years. I don't mind a few smudges on a print that is strictly for my own use.

So it was, that I was looking back at PJ's visit last month. I edited a few photos a bit, and then decided to go ahead and print one of me with my two, middle-aged children.

It printed really well for a phone shot. Let me amend that and just say that it printed up very well. As I sometimes do with prints, I held it up and asked Sue to take a picture.

I did that yesterday morning. Last evening, I looked through the folder again and found one of Sue with our kids in the same location. After faffing about with the image for awhile, I decided to also print it as well, but I don't have a photo of me holding it. For one thing, Sue was in bed when I printed it last night, and, for another thing, she's still in bed at the moment. You can see that I signed this one because it is my work from camera to print. The other one was Sue's image; I just did a wee bit of editing and the printing.

Now I must tell you that I just bought myself a wonderful Christmas gift — a new printer. It was on sale but is still in transit. Meanwhile, I thought I might as well use up some of the ink in the old printer seeing as it costs a small fortune.

Oddly enough, I still don't plan to exhibit or sell my prints, for I have been there and done that and a lowly photographer of my ilk would never sell many anyway. People's walls are pretty well full, so there's not a great demand for photos. Even I, as a photographer of sorts, have neither the desire nor the wall space to purchase prints from the professional photographers that I admire.

But I can and will now, once again, be able to continue to print photos that I like for my own enjoyment, for there is just something about a print that is more satisfying than in viewing an image on screen.

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In passing, let me answer Beatrice about how I made collages from my tablet (see previous post). I used a program called PS Express, which has all sorts of collage templates as well as other editing capabilities. She does all of her work on her iPhone and iPad and discovered this program. After playing with the free version for a few months, she purchased the full version for the cost of $50/year. It accesses whatever is already automatically on her camera toll.