Pleasant Surprise

A few months ago my Dad pulled out a picture in a frame and asked me if I would like to have it.  I guess that I inherited my Grandmother's love of photographs because my heart skipped a beat.  Old photos are usually treasured items in families that are kept on proud display or hidden away to keep them from being coveted by other family members.  My own grandmother had a long standing feud with her sister over a box filled with images.  So, when Dad held up a frame containing a picture of him on a bicycle at about 12 years old I didn't hesitate to grab it.
For the last few months the picture has been proudly displayed on top of my roll top desk.  One day I decided to get it out and scan it to digital to see if I could fix a couple of imperfections.
This is the unedited version.

 The major item that I wanted to fix is the scratch on his left arm.  Other than that there were only a few minor issues such as that stuff I refer to as snow.  The dusting of little white flecks all over the image that at one time I thought was lint.  I have since dispelled this theory because I have cleaned the scanner bed and the problem is still there.  So if anyone knows the solution to my problem I would love to hear it.

Here I have fixed the scratches and other imperfections that I found and decided to play with the color a little.

In this version I adjusted the tones of the overall image to make it appear a little richer.

 In this version I added a sepia tone.  I am not sure which one I prefer.  After I play with images I have a hard time being objective.  
There is a little mystery in this photograph.  It is not as easy to spot on the scanned image verses the real one but I will help you out a little.

If you look closely you can see clearly that there is a man standing in the field behind my Father.  No one in my family knows who this man is.  I suppose it could have been any of my Dad's cousins or extended family.  Perhaps a neighbor.  I wonder if this man knew he was in this photo?  
To sum it up, I love old photos, especially this one.   I always have.
Thanks Dad!

Funny Face....I love you

I love taking pictures of my kids.  

It's cheap entertainment and they are pretty cute.  If I do say so myself.

Once upon a time when this little bugger was small....

 

It was easy to get a good smiley or giggly shot.  

I said it was easy but it was not without some foolishness. Small ones laugh easily and readily if you are willing to put forth the "effort".  What I mean by that is you have to act like an idiot. 

 

 

Not a problem.  When you give birth you leave so much of your dignity on the floor that you don't mind pulling faces and making heinous noises to get the attention of your munchkin for a millisecond. 
 

It's just what you do.

Alas, there comes a time when they get a little bigger and the same honking sound, tongue clicking, or face pulling no longer gets the job done.  The problem is, they have seen your whole bag of tricks.  Unless you do a spot on Elmo impersonation it's all ovah baby!

And now you are in the same boat as me.  You are left with a little smirky child who is bored with picture taking so you have to suffer through ten frames of this....

To get one of these..

And this is the evidence that what I am stating is the whole truth and nothing but.

 

 

 

To tell the truth though, some of the "natural" shots of my boy are the ones I like best.  They capture his personality in a way that a sweet grin never will.

He's silly.  And I love him anyway.

Catching Flies With Chopsticks

Anyone who is at least as old as I am should remember the now classic move The Karate Kid.  If you don't, you slept through 1984.

This is a classic moment from the film in which Mr. Miyagi and Daniel are trying to catch flies with chopsticks.  It makes me appreciate the fly swat inventor cause this method is for the birds!

Looks hard, right?

Let me show you something else that is not easy.

Meet my pumpkin.

She is cutting her baby teeth(or milk teeth for the British) and anything that comes within her arm's reach will be put into her mouth for chewing.  At first feeding time was fairly easy.  She waited paitently for each bite.  Those days are gone.

Follow me.

Waiting like a little lady.

Now she sees Mommy with her peaches and it makes her H-A-P-P-Y!

She had her hand ready and plotted to take advantage of the close proximity of the spoon.  See the determination in that face.  Do not be fooled.  Manners?  She laughs in the face of manners!  This is a war baby!

Here she is with her hand ready for what I think of as "the sneak".

Spoon leaves.

Insert finger.

It's a strange phenomenon.  I don't understand it. I do understand the HUGE mess it makes.  I used to try to wipe her off between bites to minimize the carnage.  I gave that one up.

 When I pause for any reason between bites.....

 

Stage 1: Impatient

Stage 2: A warning

Stage 3: The straw

Stage 4: A full blown fit(Yes, I am from Alabama and in the south, we "throw fits")

 Next we have the aftermath....

The next bite gets more attention than the first one thought about.

Spoooon.....hhhaannds.....o my

Someone tell Kentucky Fried Chicken that peaches are where it's at.  This is the new "finger lickin good".

So what's with the chopsticks intro?  I was feeding her the other night and my husband must have heard one of my sighs because he asked if I was okay.  For some reason The Karate Kid must have been on my mind because I replied, "This is almost as hard as catching flies with chopsticks". 

There is a reward after all the mayhem.....

BATHTIME!

This Is a Test...

PC230203
Originally uploaded by dstone009

I have not posted in a while because of frustration. I had a post that I spent a lot of time writing that got partially deleted and I could not retrieve it.

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out an easier way to work with text and pictures in the HTML editor but, alas I am not HTML fluent.

So I decided to use my flickr account to see what it could do for me. I am posting this from that site just to see what it looks like. I do not see a method for posting multiple pictures so I guess this is a dead end.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite pictures of my boy. He was just old enough to pull up in this shot. He used the water cooler for a little help. Like always he wanted to see if Mommy was watching so he turned around to look for me and as he did I snapped a picture of his beautiful cherub face.

Sirius Love

I have a confession. I usually don't like to expose anything about myself that would be embarrassing or well....exposing. For lack of a better word.

Here goes.


I do not own an iPod!

















Did you gasp.

Want another?

I do not own an iPhone or even a smart phone for that matter. My phone is dumb. It only makes phone calls. Pictures you ask? Not even those can be produced by the block I carry and call phone.

Oh there was a time that I wanted to upgrade. I did. Paid a lot of money for sleek little number that I could stash in my back pocket. Guess what? My husband was helping me out with the laundry and he washed it. Did I get mad? Heck no. If I had he would never help with that loathsome chore again. I got another phone. My dead phone's twin.

So why do I carry a 3 year old brick phone right now? You'll never guess.

Wait for it.


Wait.


Here it comes.


Now.



I WASHED IT!

Can you believe it? Now I was mad the first time this happened. At my husband? Nope. Not his fault. At myself. Mostly. Just mad at the situation.

But that does not even come close to how mad I was when number 2 went down for the count. I can remember lots of times that I have wanted to throw things. Like in the movies. They will just smash a plate on the floor or throw a vase against the wall. I have always wanted to do that. But before any piece of breakable houseware met a violent end in my house I always stop and consider the maid. And who she is. She is me. I am her. She told me she wasn't cleaning that up. So it never happens. Except this one time. After I fished the phone from the sopping pocket it had drowned in, I saw the fog in the screen, I knew it was over. I lost it. So the phone met the floor. Really hard. And broke. The maid never said a word.

So it was in defeat that I scrounged out one of our old phones and inserted my sim card. I have looked at phones several times thinking about trying it again. The truth is, it is just not that big of a deal to me. My 3 year old has learned how to use "brick" and loves calling all his grandparents when ever he wants to. If I bought a new phone and it was harder to use he would be crushed. One thing I wish I had was a camera. But let's face it the kind of camera you get on a phone is less than awful. Granted they are better than what I paid 300 dollars for in my senior year of high school, but we are now spoiled by an affordable 12 mega pixel camera. So 1.3 just doesn't excite me anymore.

The other thing I miss is music. I love music. I should have had a career in music. Not that I have any talent to speak of but there must be some job where you get paid just to listen. Right? I could be better than those jerks in Rolling Stone. Well maybe not but I can dream. Enchaways...my phone cannot play music to lull me out of reality either.

But I do have something that can.

Meet My Love, My Sirius Stiletto 2
















I was one of those "who would pay for radio when it's free" group members when satellite radio first came out. I thought that was like having a wife and paying for a prostitute. But that is because we had not been formally introduced. Since we met I have fallen. In Sirius love.


How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.


1. Any flavor at any time.Lots of choices.





Like 130 of those. That's 1-3-0 different channels.

2. Few commercials. They claim to be commercial free. Mostly they are but I count any music interutption as a commercial and apparently they don't.

3. Rewind. (Yes, if you did not scream out your lungs the first time through "Living on a Prayer" you can rewind and try try again)

4. Fast Forward (While you were "Living on a Prayer" for the second time your station has moved down south to "Panama" with Van Halen and you just don't feel like sunscreen right now? So hit the fast forward.)

5. Record. Unquestionably the best feature. For those of you that are as old as I am, do you remember the days before Cd's? We had to buy stacks of blank tapes at Walmart and keep one in the boom box while we listened for the radio to play the latest song(Too Legit To Quit, Anyone? Anyone?) When we heard the DJ announce it we would morph into superman, fly across the room, hit the play and record button at the same time, and break out into the happy dance. If you don't know what I am talking about you were not resourceful or your folks gave you money for frivolous stuff like music. The only cassette tape that I remember my dad buying for me was Micheal Jackson's Thriller.












And for that I had to promise to pay him back. And I did. All 50 cents that I had to my name at the time. And there you have the reason why he never bought me another. So back to the point.

YOU CAN RECORD ANYTHING THAT COMES ON BY PRESSING ONE BUTTON.

It will hold something like 10 hours of recorded music. Suweet!

There are more features to the Stiletto but those are the ones I utilize most. For all the sports fans you can set it to give you score updates across the bottom of the screen no matter what channel you are listening too. Just keep one eye on the road buddy!

My hubby likes to make use of the portable option. When he does yard work he clips it on like a portable and plugs in his headphones. In this mode you can use the wireless option to hook up to your homes wireless network if you have one and listen on the net. Or you can skip the trouble of that and just listen to the library of recorded music and your own mp3's you have uploaded to it(forgot to mention that feature).

But the root of my love comes from the record feature. When I want to listen to a certain song, I can scroll through my library list, find my recording of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance and do the bucket seat boogie all the way to my driveway. Unless stopped at a red light of course. Under which circumstance I will act like a dignified grownup that I pretend to be in the presence of other grown ups.

Alas, a few months ago my flavor was Poker Face. Now instead of having purchased this song and casting it off, I simply delete from my library to make way for Bad Romance. Or you can keep em both if you want, 10 hours is a lot of music.

So I save a lot of money by not buying iTunes. And that ladies and gentleman is how I justify keeping the brick and paying for the prostitute!

Growing Up

I dropped off my kids at my in-laws this morning so that they could visit and I could have a little time by myself which is hard to come by these days.

As I was leaving I decided (more like needed) to stop at a coffee shop on the way home and have a latte (I left home without my usual 3 cups of joe). I also had a craving for a lemon poppy seed muffin. As I pulled up to the drive thru I asked the barista what kind of muffins they had. She proceeded to go through all the muffin flavors and then tell me about the scones. She described the scones as flat muffins in the shape of a triangle.

Um...no not quite right. Scones and I go way back. We became best buds in college. When she was in diapers. Okay, I am not that old but she was really young still ordering Happy Meals at McDonald's for sure. But who am I to correct her.

A scone is more of a muffin/biscuit hybrid.

A miscuit!

A buffin!

A muffcuit!

I will stop now.

So I pull away with my bliss...I mean latte.. and my orange cranberry buffin...er...scone.

I am reminded of my college years.



When this little baby was my only baby.

And she was small....really small.

I don't know where the picture is or I would show you but I could hold her entire body in my palm.






I used to go to coffee shops all the time and sip(drown in)coffee and nibble(seriously munch)scones as I trudged through my homework. What can I say but I needed the sugar and caffeine to keep me from falling asleep on my homework. The profs don't like it when you punctuate with drool.

Oh those days of footloose and fancy free. Jumping in the car anytime I felt like it to sit hours upon hours at a cramped uncomfortable table with a hard seat. But I loved it. Sometimes I miss it.



And then I remember what I traded that life in for.

This.....


















And this...




















Those.....













And lots of toes....