Sunday, March 1, 2015

Hello my loves,

I hope this letter finds you happy and healthy.

My current desktop is an old photo, one I found while searching through old photos.

Dang!

I have taken so many photos through the years! And there isn’t very much organization to them either. My photos are stored by date taken. I used to have a file called “Desktop Photos”. If I used it for a desktop photo, I put it in that file. I used to think that I would, at some point, make a compact disk of them as a gift but someplace along the line, I stopped doing that.

I also have another file called “Reduced Size” and all the photos that I use in my letters or post online are in that file.

Why is it called “Reduced Size”?

Because I have reduced the size of the photos. My photos are taken at a very large size. Five and six gigabytes. That means you can blow my photos up and not lose resolution. The biggest I’ve ever had one printed was 36x24 and it is still very sharp. Photos this size are much, much too large to send over the internet so I use a program called Paint and resize them. I like my photos to be around 100 Kilobytes when I send them.

“Kilobytes, megabytes, what’s the difference?” you ask.

I’m so glad you asked! So here it is, straight from the internet.

1 Byte = 8 Bit
1 Kilobyte = 1,024 Bytes
1 Megabyte = 1,048,576 Bytes
1 Gigabyte = 1,073,741,824 Bytes
1 Terabyte = 1,099,511,627,776

“Peg! All this kilobyte and megabyte stuff gives me a headache!”

I know, right! Me too!

I wasn’t looking at old photos to take a trip down Memory Lane. I was looking at old photos to make Kevin a gift for his birthday.

Once, a long time ago, Kevin told me that my shots of the blue herons would make a good sequence grouping. I hadn’t started out with the thought of framing some of my photos for Kevin. Truth be known, I probably wasn’t going to do anything for Kevin beyond what Mike and I had already planned. But there I was, walking around a store and came across these three frames at a good price. From there it was a short leap to framing the herons for him. What was I going to do with the other two frames? I didn’t know.

“Peg, you have enough photos that you could do three frames for him.”

I know, right! I’m a slow thinker and you guys got there long before I did! I’ll get there, it will just take me longer. But at the time, I only needed one frame so I am doubly surprised (and grateful) that I picked all three of them up.

So, since we live here at the dam I decided to use a second frame to make a grouping of Bagnell Dam photos. It was only at this point that I decided to do all three as a gift for Kevin.

That decided, what was I going to do for the third frame?

I was looking through the old photos finding the dam pictures and I started picking out other photos that I thought would make good groupings.

I had a grouping of red things, purple things, green things, old buildings, spider webs, butterflies, birds and flowers. How in the world was I ever going to decide? It’s like being asked to pick your favorite child. I love them all and couldn’t decide on one. The task was too daunting for me.

“You could give him extra photos and he could change them out as he got tired of looking at them,” you say.

That was one of my ideas too! And as I looked at photos and my groupings grew and grew-I was drowning. It was all too much for me and I stopped. I put the brakes on. I decided I really had to ask for help.

Well, they will most likely be hung in their house, I thought. Kandyce should have a say in it.

Kandyce is a really good secret keeper. I knew I could ask for her help and she wouldn’t tell Kevin. I texted her and she said she would help.

Three days before Kevin’s birthday rolls around and I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Kandyce. I was starting to panic. I called Kevin.

“When are you guys gonna stop by? Kandyce promised to help me with a project I’m doing,” I told him. Although I don’t really think she promised.

“I think we can stop tonight, for a few minutes,” Kevin told me.

When they showed up I sat Kandyce in front of my computer and showed her how I had things grouped but she could pick whatever she wanted. Then I left her to help with Andrew and keep Kevin distracted.

Whew! Am I ever glad I asked for help. There was not a single spider web, butterfly or flower among the groupings that Kandyce picked.

She agreed with the heron photos.

She picked three from the dam photos. One in the spring with all 12 flood gates open-which doesn’t happen very often, one from the overlook in the summer and my winter photo with the fog and the bird flying over the roadway.

For the last grouping Kandyce picked from the old buildings file.

I didn’t have to do anything at all with the heron or the dam photos but the old building photos needed some help. The cabin had a dent in the roof where a tree fell on it. I took it out. Easy breezy, lemon squeezy. The train depot in Dushore had a height restriction sign right by the front corner. I took it out. In the photo with the train car was the back side of a diamond shaped sign. That one was harder to do. After fooling with it for a long time, I planted a bush and took care of it! If you took the photos that I fixed and blew them up, you would probably see where I fixed them. But because they were only 4x6 they came out fabulous!

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This weekend finds almost half our household sick, if you count the critters. Mike has bronchitis. Let me tell you something. Bronchitis is like hemorrhoids. You don’t appreciate how painful it is until you experience it for yourself. Two days after Mike started with the symptoms I started. Luckily when Mike went to the doctor, the doctor gave me a prescription too.

Ginger gave me a scare. She started vomiting and vomited every couple of hours for the next 24 hours. What a rough night that was. I would wake from sleep, locate her and get her to the linoleum floor so she wouldn’t heave on the carpet. I was up at least three times with her.

“What did she get into?” Mike asked me, but I didn’t know if she had gotten into anything or not. She tends to run ahead of me so if she finds some tempting morsel, she could snatch it up and swallow it before I even knew she found anything.

There is-was a mess in the parking lot. It looked like a puddle of hot chocolate with a napkin stuck in it, but I didn’t look at it very close. I didn’t really want to know. But I knew whatever it was it wasn’t good for the girls, so I steered them away from it. For days I had been keeping Itsy and Ginger away from it. Then I glance up and see Ginger nosing in the snow bank.

“GIT OUTTA THERE!” I said in my mean mommy voice and Ginger took off. I checked out the spot where she was and there was something there. I couldn’t decide if the remnants looked like napkin or bird poop and I didn’t have a clue if she had ingested any of it or not. It was later that afternoon that the vomiting started. I was worried that she may have gotten something and she couldn’t get it up. I was worried about blockage.

We took her to the vet and they took x-rays. No blockage. They gave her a shot to stop the vomiting and gave me three different medications to give her over the next few days.

Hey!

I found out the best way to give a dog a pill is to coat it in some liverwurst. That stuff has such a strong smell that it covers up any smell they could possibly pick up from the pill.

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That cat!

That darn cat!

Yeah, Baby Blue. I caught her all snuggled down in my carry bag last week. I really don’t like having my bag full of cat hair and after I snapped the photo, I chased her out. She is a rascal!

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Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike