Miss Me?

           Did you miss me?

          I know that some of you did. And know this for sure — I missed you. In my mind’s eye, I see all your beautiful faces, feel your hearts full of love, and try to think what pictures you might like to see, what stories you might like to hear.

          “Where were you?” you wanna know.

          Where was I?

          Well, actually, I wasn’t anywhere, at least not during my letter blog writing time. I was here in my mountain home, working on a very special and time sensitive project for a very special lady I love.

          “What were you doing?” you ask.

          I’m so glad you asked!

          My church peep, and sister in Christ, Joanie, is the lady I was talking about. Her 95-year-old mother died and Joanie found a journal Eileen had been keeping. Inside the journal she wrote letters to her children. Eileen had thirteen kids but they’ve lost a sibling to cancer.

          “I’d like to make copies of this for my siblings,” Joanie mentioned to me.

          “I can do that for you.” Joanie gave me the journal. I scanned each page into my computer — as a jpeg — a picture. I wanted to be able to edit them.

          Then Joanie sent me enough photos that I could put pictures on all the opposing pages. I tried my best to match a picture to who or what Eileen was talking about.

          I started the project on a Wednesday, worked on it over the weekend, and finished it just two hours before the deadline, six days later. Whew! There for a while I wasn’t sure I was even going to get it done!

          “What took so long?” you wonder.

          There were 43 pages including a front cover, a memorial page, and a printed copy of the obit. Scanning takes time. I wasn’t tracking, so I don’t know how long it took to do that part, but it wasn’t overly long. After scanning, the pages had to be edited, then brought over to a program where I resized them to print on a half-sheet size piece of paper.

          All of the photos had to be downloaded (which didn’t take too long), then they had to go through some editing — cropping and adjusting the light, and to add a little more interest — a little more cuteness — I added frames and clipart. Again, I wasn’t tracking time so I don’t know how long the designing portion took either.

          Printing! Now that was time consuming! Because everything printed as photos, it took the printer thirty minutes to print 15 copies of one side of one page — and the pages were double-sided. That’s 84 pages! Do the math.

          “Peg, your math isn’t very good,” you say.

          I know, right! Two pages were single sided.

          Aaaaaaand — we won’t mention the reprints because I messed up.

          Let’s complicate this a little more, shall we?

          Our church let me use their comb binder and combs to put the books together. I took 45 pages with me so I could get the right size comb. The largest size in our stock seemed the right fit to me.

          “Are you sure it’s gonna fit?” my ever-helpful handsome mountain man asked as he saw my pile of printed papers grow.

          “I think so.”

          “If you need bigger ones, we need to order them now so you get them in time,” he pointed out.

          He was right. I took 45 pages and punched ‘em. The machine only has two adjustments for paper size, regular and legal. Consequently, the holes were very close to the bottom edge on a half-sheet. The comb size was perfect for the number of pages. In another respect, they were too long. I had to cut four combs off so they fit.

          I continued the printing process, calling up the next page on my computer and adding paper to the printer.

          You know, Peg, I said to myself. And to quote my father, “I always call myself Bert ‘cause that’s my name, don’cha know?” Rather than printing them all, why don’t you print half? Then you can bind them while the rest are printing.

          That sounded like a good idea to me!

          Another perk of doing it that way was if I messed up and put the wrong picture on the back of the wrong page, I’d only mess up seven copies instead of 16.

          “Peg, I thought you were making 15 copies?” you query.

          Yes, that’s true. But I was printing a copy for our church as well. Several people expressed an interest in reading it, so 16 copies it was.

          I was contemplating the punching issue and how I could better center the punches on the half sheet. I need something to put in for a stop. I even thought maybe I wouldn’t change it because if I did, I’d have to reprint 45 pages — or they wouldn’t align. I pushed that thought aside. I wanted them to be nice for my best girl.

          A picture of a stick flashed through my mind’s eye. But how to get a small piece was rattling around in my head. I envisioned pulling a splinter off a piece of wood or cutting myself as I whittled a piece down. Then my thoughts landed on a toothpick! It was already small. I broke the tip off and thought to insert it against the stop. But how am I going to hold it there? I wondered. The answer came to me — hot glue!

          “How will you get the glue off?” you ask.

          No worries. Hot glue doesn’t bond well to plastic. I was almost certain I’d be able to peel it off. To make sure, I tried it in an inconspicuous spot. I was right. The glue peeled right off.

          At first, I thought I’d put the toothpick inside, against the stop, then I saw how the machine was made and knew it would work better, and be easier to remove, if I laid it across the top.

Despite being careful, I had to reprint a lot — thanks to misaligned punches, punching the pages upside down, and misprints. The rejects aren’t a total loss, though. I can use them to clean paint from the plate in gel printing.

                    >>>*<<<

          In other news...

          I had a big bird circling my house one day. I got my camera and looked through the zoom. It was a turkey vulture. I didn’t think too much about it. The next day I walk out and see a big bird sitting in a tree across the road and two more big birds took flight from the ground. I grabbed my camera. Turkey vultures.

          Something’s dead, I think. And you might not be surprised to hear that I had to find out what it was. One thing I knew for sure, all of my cats were accounted for.

          I found a way down the steep bank and made my way to where I thought the buzzards had been. I didn’t find or smell anything dead. Maybe they were just resting or getting a drink from the nearby creek.

          A lot of garbage has accumulated on the bank through the years.

          A tire so old it’s been assimilated into the ecosystem.

          An old can, slowly rusting away.

          A huge concrete slab. 

          My camera found other things to photograph as well. The white against all the winter brown caught my eye. I thought, fungus? Looking closer, I was surprised that they were teeny tiny flowers!

          More white. The veins of a leaf. 

          The bright reds of the newly sprouting multiflora rose leaves.

          The catkins have gone to seed and droop with the wetness of the recent rain. 

          Someday I’m going to hack steps into the steep bank and have access to our part of this beautiful creek.

          >>>*<<<

          The lease for our Buick will be up soon. Mike has had his heart set on an electric vehicle for some time, so we went shopping. While EVs are still pretty pricey, and the infrastructure is still lacking, we found a Kia Sorento Hybrid that we could afford.

          Can you say road pictures?

          “Road pictures!”

Still standing! 

          Train graffiti. 

          Turkeys.

          We couldn’t buy a car that day. We keep our credit frozen so no one can apply for credit in our name, but we got to look at a Sorento, sit in it, check out its features, talk about whether to lease or buy, what rebates and interest rates were being offered, then we talked about color.

          “I don’t want a black interior,” Mike told Rich, the agent at Kia.

          “Black is by far the most requested color for interior,” he told us. “That makes it hard to find in any other color. Let me check and see what we have at our other dealerships.”

          We waited.

          “They have two at the dealership in New York. I can have it here tomorrow.”

          We made an appointment to come in the next day and went home and unfroze our credit.

The next morning, we were on our way when Rich called us. “It’s not here yet and I don’t know when it will be here. And once it gets here, we still have to detail it.”

We rescheduled.

“I’m surprised he said Monday,” I told Mike.

“How come?”

“When we were down there at the dealership, he said he was taking Monday and Tuesday off to use up some of his vacation days.”

Monday. We were excited to be shedding this shoebox of Buick Encore. Okay! Okay! It might not be quite that small, but it’s too small for us.

“Let’s use the GPS and see if there’s a different way to get there,” I suggested. “Maybe I’ll get some new pictures for my letter blog.”

“Okay,” Mike agreed.

I put Matthews Kia of Blakely in my phone and let it take us across country.

Can you say, “Road pictures!”

The first part of the trip was on roads we usually travel.

We interrupted breakfast.

The forsythia is blooming in Tunkhannock, days before ours bloom here.

Once we hit Dalton, we left the highway. I took a picture of the building on the corner both coming and going.

          Another coming and going picture.

          Mike and I walked in the dealership, my eyes trained to Rich’s office. It was dark. “He’s not here,” I said.

          There were a couple of other guys around. One was with a customer and one was on the phone.

          “Let’s look at it again and just make sure there’s enough room,” Mike said and opened the Sorento Hybrid on the showroom floor.

          I will always be grateful Rich wasn’t there that day.

          As Mike sat in the Sorento, I watched as a bald-headed guy in a bright orange Under Armour shirt glanced at me, pushed his chair back from his desk, and stood up with the phone to his ear. Trying to wrap up his conversation as quickly as he could, he bent over as his head followed the handset to its cradle. Straightening up came around the desk.

          “Are you the Lubys?” he asked.

          I grinned. “We are.”

          He extended his hand. “I’m Billy. Rich called in sick this morning and asked me to take over for him.”

          It was only when I took his hand that I noticed there was something different about Billy. I’m not going to say wrong, because there’s nothing wrong with him. Billy was born with ectrodactyly or split hand/split foot malformation (SHFM).

          We spent the next four hours or so, making a deal on a new car and getting to know this amazing man.

          “Tell us about him,” you say.

          I fully intend to — but not now. Not in this letter blog. I want to write another story just about Billy. It may take me some time to do it, so don’t look for it right away, but it will soon be in the works!

          I have more pictures to show you, more stories, and I forgot a part of one of my stories. It’s too hard to fix now because all the pictures jump around on the pages and it’s a real time-consuming job to fix it. Much easier to talk about it next time.

          Let’s call this one done!