Sunday, August 17, 2014

My current desktop photo is a pretty lavender wildflower with yellow star centers. I only took the photo because I thought it might work as a desktop photo for me. The way the flowers are balanced would leave the left hand side clear and that is where all of my icons are lined up. Boy, what a delightful surprise to find that spider on the far right flower and I think I see a pair of antennas (antennae?) or legs or something sticking out of the folded over flower in the center of the bunch. Can you see them?

“How about telling us how you dealt with all those chigger bites in your next letter?” Momma asked me on the phone the other night.

I have to tell you, I was thrown for a loop when she asked me that. About the same time I asked, “What do you mean?” it dawned on me what she meant. “Oh,” I said. “I don’t do anything.”

“Don’t they itch?” she asked.

“Yes they itch and when they itch, I scratch them!” But I try not to scratch them too much because if I do, they itch even more. Luckily I don’t suffer too much. Maybe because I spend most of the spring and summer dotted with chigger bites and I have a slight tolerance to them. Does that make sense? However, I have been known to take an antihistamine for the itching. Especially when I worked and I had bites in places it wasn’t nice to scratch in polite company.

Now Ginger, poor baby, has been scratching all week!

After I finish writing my weekly letters, I usually read them to Mike. Last week I was reading to him when I heard a snore. That stinker fell asleep right in the middle of my story! Am I boring or what?

Mike must have missed the part where I told you what LED stood for because I had it wrong. But in my defense, I always say, “Laser emitting diode,” and Mike always corrects me.

Mike loves LED lights! I can’t tell you how many times we have conversations that go much like this-

“Look at those lights, Peg! They’re LED’s!” Mike says enthusiastically. “I want LED lights! They are so efficient! They don’t use hardly any energy and they last forever! Everything’s going to LED’s.” Then, after a pause and just to see if I’m paying attention, he asks, “What’s LED stand for?”

To which I reply, “Laser emitting diode.”

“Light emitting diode,” he corrects.

And that is the game we play. Isn’t it funny how you can say something so many times that it makes it true, even when it’s not?



I mentioned last time that I was wearing glasses. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that I used to wear glasses. Probably for 25 years or more. A few years ago I noticed that I could see better without my glasses. My vision was improving and I stopped wearing them. I could even pass my drivers test without glasses. So corrective lenses fell off my drivers license.

At about the same time, something else was going on too. I was getting dizzy spells. It took me a while to figure out that I was seeing double. More out of one eye than the other. I suffered with that for a few weeks before I decided that maybe I had better check it out and find out what was going on.

“You have cataracts forming and it’s splitting your vision,” the eye doctor told me.

Eventually I adjust to seeing double so well that I hardly even notice it anymore, and the dizzy spells have passed.

Well, let me just say that getting old isn’t for sissies. All kinds of things happen to your body (and mind) and almost no one warns you about the things to come. Or maybe we think it won’t happen to us. Either way, vision is one of those things that almost never gets any better.

Having said all that, I used to have myopia, nearsightedness, and now I couldn’t see things close up. Geesh! So, for the last few years I used over the counter cheater glasses. But you know what? That gets to be a pain in the arse because you never have a pair when and where you need them! I decided to get glasses for full time again. Besides, it adds interest to my face.

“Can you read the first line?” the doctor at the Wal Mart Vision Center asked me. And I read the first line. Then he asked if I could read the next and the next. Then we got to a point where I was having some trouble.

“How about the next line?” he asked.

“It would be easier if there weren’t two of them,” I told him, but in the next second it dawned on me that there wasn’t supposed to be two. I had been living with it for so long that I just didn’t think about it anymore. “Are there supposed to be two?” I asked, but knew there wasn’t.

“No,” he answered and his whole demeanor changed.

“Oh, yeah. I have cataracts forming that split my vision,” I had to explain.

He wanted to know when and where I had it checked and I knew the doctors name, but had forgotten how long ago it had been. Regardless, this doctor looked deep into my eyes and from what he could see, he didn’t think I had any other issues going on.

“I see you have [such and such],” he said. Which, such and such is not a medical term, I just can’t remember what he called it.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“It’s a congenital thing you were born with and it means you have specks or floaters in a certain part of your eye.” He named the part, but I don’t remember what he called it, and maybe you guys already know about that stuff. Me? It was the first time, in all of my 55 years, that I ever had anyone tell me that.

Isn’t this pump beautiful!

It seems that creativity and artistry run in my family!

Do I sound proud? Well, I am!

My oldest and much adored sister, Patti, made this pump. When she sent me the photo last week she called it her California Pump. I was going to show it to you last week, but I had so much trouble with the picture, I gave up, deciding to deal with it later. But I’ll tell you more about that in a minute.

I skirted around the issues with the photo that I was having and managed to get it imported into this letter than I called Patti.

“Why do you call this a California Pump?” I asked her. She laughed at me.

“That’s not what I said. I called it my California Inspired Pump With A Cowboy Twist,” and she laughed again. I love to hear her laugh.

It seems her friends in California had a couple of fountains and she enjoyed them so much, she decided she needed to add a fountain feature to her beautifully landscaped yard, and this is what she came up with. I love it!

And the sandstone catch basin? Isn’t it just perfect!

“Lee found it somewhere,” Patti said of her husband. It was naturally formed by water over the years-centuries maybe?

“What issues did you have with her picture?” you ask.

Sigh.

I have been doing this letter and blog thing for a long time and I have never come across this issue before.

Patti sent me two photos in a zipped file. No problem. I know how to unzip and save it, and that’s what I did. I picked the one I wanted to use, then I reduced it’s size as I do with all my photos. Then I decide I had better ask her if I could share it with you. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t mind, none the less, I sent her a text asking for permission. I was so sure she would okay it that I went ahead and put it in my letter while I was waiting for her to answer. I thought she would answer before it was time for me to send it anyway, and if she said no, then I would just delete it. But that’s when my problems all started. I clicked on the ‘Insert Picture’ button on my program, found the file and the photo and clicked on ‘Insert’ and nothing happened. I waited, wondering what was going on. Normally it is only seconds for the photo to appear on my page. Did my computer freeze up, I wondered. It does that sometimes. I clicked on a different program and the computer opened it up. That tells me my computer wasn’t frozen, it was just working. I fooled around with things for a while, trying to figure out what was going on and after what seemed like an eternity, my letter writing program started to respond again, however, I still couldn’t see the photo. Where was it? I thought maybe it was on the last page and when I glanced down at my page number it said....

Are you ready for this?...

It said page 6 of 32,767!

I know, right!

There must be extra information attached to the photo, was the only explanation I could come up with. I hit the ‘undo’ button and after a few seconds I was back to six pages. Whew!

I went over to my pictures library and looked at Patti’s photo. 202 KB. No way should that add over 32,000 pages to my letter. And...

Oh yeah!

Lots of times I copy and paste from the internet and I sometimes get the message that the volume exceeds what I can paste into my document. Why didn’t I get that message this time? I don’t get it!

Okay, what next? Try it again? You know it! I always try things more than once, or look in the same place for something more than once, because there are times when it works the second or third time you try it, or I will find what I was looking for the second or third time I look in the same place.

“Did it work the next time?” I hear you ask.

No. It didn’t. The same thing happened. 32,767 pages. But at least this time I knew what was going on. I hit ‘undo’ again.

Now what? With chin on hand, elbow on desk, and another sigh, I sat and thought about it.

Maybe there is something wrong with my letter format. And the only reason I suspect this is because I keep a saved, formatted, blank document that I use every week. I start my letter and click the ‘save as’ button. That keeps my blank document blank and dates my current letter.

I opened a new blank page and clicked on the ‘Insert Picture’ button, found the file and the photo and clicked ‘insert’. Bam! There it was, working just the way it is supposed to work! And just one page! Now I know it works. I closed it, without saving, and guess what I did next.

Yep. I tried, for the third time, to insert it in my letter.

Stop laughing, would ya?

I knew at once that I was going to get the same thing I got the other two times, namely, 32,767 pages.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on and frankly, I was tired of fooling with it. Then the tone on my phone alerted me to a new text message. It was Patti. Yes, I can share it, but wait. She has a better photo for me to share.

“Great. Send it to me, but it will be next week before I use it,” I texted back to her.

That was that, and I didn’t have to think about it for a week.

Today, when I sat down, the first thing I did was format the new photo Patti sent me, you know, reduce the size. Wrote my letter, got to the part where I wanted to put the pump photo and guess what?

“It worked?” you guess.

I was hoping with the new photo that it would work too, but it didn’t. Once again I ended up with 32,767 pages. And that puzzles me. I was on page six last time and ended up with 32,767 pages and I was on page three this time and ended up with 32,767 pages. Same number of pages.

I opened a new blank document, copied my text and pasted it into the new document, inserted the pump photo, and ended up with 32,767 pages.

I started again. This time I inserted the photo first, then I copied and pasted my text from the other letter and that is how I skirted the issue.

Isn’t that the screwiest story you ever heard? Does anyone, have any idea what is going on?

I have just a little bit of room left. Tell me what you think of this photo that was posted on Facebook.

Lots of love,

Peg and Mike