Because I Haven't Written Anything...

I'm posting a photograph I worked on last night.


I've been playing around with learning to digitally matte and frame a photograph. I thought this photo of one of Lovely Wife's flowers might be a worthy subject, and really liked the way it turned out.

I think it might be even better in B&W, but it was bedtime for Bonzo last night, so the B&W version will be a project for another day.

Anyway, I thought y'all might like some beauty for your Monday since I haven't written anything.

Picture Post, Sunday September 9, 2007

The Gene Pool, paternal side.

I've been scanning and trying to clean up and repair a bunch of old family photos in the past few weeks.

It's slow going on the ones that need a lot of work. I'm a pretty patient man, and make a good drone and can sit for hours doing tedious work, but some of these try even my sanity.

When working on photos of people, I try to remove dust specks and blemishes to the photos on people's faces and clothes. After that, if I have any patience left I will try to clean up the other parts of the photos as best I can.

In the end, I'm just trying to make them as presentable as my sanity allows and to archive them for the future.

This first one is one of my Dad that I scanned and just really liked a lot. It was in really good shape and I like his expression.

This next one is of my Aunt Gayle when she was a little girl sitting with Sainted Mother on the edge of a natural spring. The water below them is perfectly clear and drinkable, I would suspect even today.

The place is just called Camp Swan by everyone in the area because it was a site for a camp of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the great depression. I'm sure this natural spring was the deciding factor in the location of the camp, and the concrete walls Mama and Aunt Gayle are sitting on date from the depression era and was constructed by the men who lived here.

This next one is of my Dad's mother, Eunice Williamson, on the right in the photo. The back of the photo simply had 'Dixie and Eunice' written there. We have no idea now who Dixie was, but this is the only photo I've seen of my paternal grandmother in her early teens. I estimate her age to be about 13-15 years old here, and that puts the photo having been taken sometime in the late 1920s. This photo was a mess, lots of stuff to try to clean up and repair, plus it's a little blurry which I can do nothing to fix.

This next photo is my Dad's father, my Papaw Masters. His full name is Malone Roswell Masters. He married the girl on the right in the above photo, though he was 61 years old when this photo was taken. This is pretty much how I remember him; sitting in the shade in a chair and smiling. All of our family pretty much got along with one another really well, but WE ALL loved Papaw Masters like crazy. He was a good, good man and someone we all looked up to. The only time I every personally saw my father cry was a couple of days after Papaw Masters, his dad, died.

This next photo is one that pleased me to no end to find. It's of my Papaw Masters's mother, Lee Anna Masters. She died in 1961, almost exactly a year before I was born. She and my grandfather above lived very hard lives. She conceived and bore my Dad's dad out of wedlock, and raised him on her own in a time and place where things were hard enough without being a bastard and being called that at every turn by the people in the area. It's amazing to me that people can withstand the poverty of the depression and being looked down upon by many of the locals and become fine people who were salt of the earth, dependable people their whole lives. They never had a spare dollar in their lives but they were good, humble people who always lent a hand to those in need. They always called her Miss Lee Anna. Miss Lee Anna is on my short list of people I wish I could have met and gotten to know.

I worked on this last photo, cleaning up scratches and tears until I just got sick of working on it. You can still see big scratches in it, but they're out of the way of the people. This is another of Lee Anna Masters, my paternal great grandmother. That's my Dad's younger brother, Alden, sitting in the background with his feet propped up. In the original photo, Miss Lee Anna was in the shade and you could barely see her. I brightened up the photo quite a bit so that you can at least see her pretty decent here. That's the beauty of digital scans; you can improve some photos over having the original in your hand.

I am a blessed man to have come from such good people. I sure miss them.

Someone a while back mentioned to me that they had a lot of old family photos that have no names or anything on them. It finally hit me last night, after a year and a half of doing this type of scanning, to simply put the names and places (if known) and dates on the front of the photos as I work on them. I have no idea why it took me so long to think of that. At least someone in the future will have at least a little info, if only a name, on the photos I save. Now I have a ton of photos I've worked on in the past to go back and add names and stuff.

I'll try to work on some of my mother's side next and put a few on here.

I've started putting photos up on my photography blog, John's Daily Digital Images, more regularly now if you care to go over and see some new photos of the real Florida.

Later.

A Dream Come True (A drama in real life!)

I lay on my back in the hospital bed.

The doctor and a nurse were on my right, the nurse having just placed an IV into my arm.

"We're putting several anti-poison chemicals in your IV. They should protect you from any normal poison that the men trying to kill you might use," said the doctor.

Just as he finished speaking, I looked to the foot of the bed and there stood four men, each holding up liquid filled syringes. When I noticed them they each reached to stick their needles in my feet to poison me.

I started kicking at them, and realizing that I was seconds from perhaps several lethal doses of poison, I twisted over quickly to my left and off the hospital bed onto the floor.

I was simply a man in dire straights, operating on pure instinct, thinking that having contorted myself out of bed and onto the floor, I might buy precious seconds with which to find some way of defending myself.

I twisted so fast and so hard that although I had been laying on my back in the hospital bed, I completely turned and landed on my butt on the floor.

Then...

I woke up.

I was half sitting up on the floor beside our Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed.

I had acted in my real bed just as I had in the hospital bed of my dream and woke when my right buttock made violent contact with the carpeting on the bedroom floor.

I had really spun completely around in my attempt to avoid my dream murderers and had flung off the mask from my CPAP unit as well.

I had grunted when I hit the floor, and Lovely Wife jumped out of her side of the bed, turned on the light and came around to see about me.

I was so stunned that I had to sit/lay there and not move until I had taken stock of myself and that I hadn't popped something else loose in my back in my violent maneuver.

I carefully moved to where I could get up and get back into bed, lay there until I was sure that nothing was broken or ruined in my back, put my mask back on and went back to sleep.

This morning, Lovely Wife noticed I had a bruise on my RIGHT upper arm from where I hit the bedside table in my ninja move to get away from the bad guys.

I had been laying there sleeping on my left side, facing the edge of the bed, and twisted that far around and onto the floor in my sleep, hitting my arm on the wooden corner in the process.

The strangest thing about this happening now, is that I have just made a list of things that I can write about on this blog.

On the short list of subjects is one where I was going to write about how, when I was a boy, I slept on the top bed of a bunk bed with Big Brother on the bunk below.

The house we lived in at the time had hardwood floors and I would occasionally roll out of the top bunk onto the hardwood floor.

I would be so thoroughly asleep that Big Brother, awakened by my body plunking onto the floor next to him, would reach over, wake me up, and have me climb back up into my bed.

I had planned to make a big joke of it, as if I had finally realized what could have made me the weird person that I am today, and that it might have possibly been my repeated falls from the top bunk onto the hardwood flooring as a kid.

But, Wednesday night, I think I topped even my falls from the top bunk.

It has been over 25 years since I fell out of bed.

But when I decided to do it again after all this time, I did it with panache.

I guess I have more of a natural dramatic flair than I would have ever thought before.

The Party Pooper's Guide® #2

[I found where I had written this almost a year ago without having posted it on here, and since I've been having great trouble finding time to write posts, I decided to post it today in it's entirety.]

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Warning: A rated PG-13 Post!

I have a dark side to my humor, that gets little airplay here.

So, in the vein of my Thursday Thirteen #12 last week, I'll post an occasional The Party Pooper's Guide®.

The Party Pooper looks at life sideways.

For example: I saw this small news item recently...

Urination Will Go To Committee

A local decision that schoolboys must sit on toilet seats when urinating has provoked political debate.

The head of The Democrats Party, a splinter group of former Progress Party hardliners, Vidar Kleppe, is outraged that boys at Dvergsnes School in Kristiansand have to sit and pee.

Kleppe accuses the school of fiddling with God's work, and wants the matter discussed at the executive committee level of the local council, newspaper Dagbladet reports.

"When boys are not allowed to pee in the natural way, the way boys have done for generations, it is meddling with God's work," Kleppe told the newspaper.

"It is a human right not to have to sit down like a girl," Kleppe said.

Principal Anne Lise Gjul at Dvergsnes School would not comment on Kleppe's plans to make political waves and regretted if anyone was offended by the ban on standing and passing water.

Gjul told NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) that the young boys are simply not good enough at aiming, and the point was to have a pleasant toilet that could be used by both boys and girls.

(Aftenposten English Web Desk/NTB)

That is from a newspaper in Norway.

And to The Party Pooper, that's just plain funny.

It reminded me of a guy with the company that I work for. Jim L. is a really big, intimidating looking guy, but also happens to be a cracker jack engineer.

Jim L. would walk up to Satan himself and tell him EXACTLY what Jim L. thought of him. Fear is not in Jim's vocabulary.

I worked for three years with him on a program, and in the men's bathroom, like the Norwegian boys referred to above, there was a problem, shall we say, with men's accuracy when it came to using a urinal.

Jim L. would get so disgusted with this, that he would go to the janitor's closet, and run a bucket of mop water, and mop the men's bathroom.

Jim L. also let it be known, loudly and repeatedly, that he was displeased with the men's performance in this area of personal hygiene.

Finally, Jim L. put a sign in the men's room, right at eye level, exactly equidistant to the two urinals (right between 'em).

Jim L.'s professional looking sign, printed in color on a color laser printer and carefully placed into one of those clear plastic 3-ring binder paper protectors, stated:

Stand Closer: It's not as long as you think it is.

Jim L. started a long feud with this program's secretary (and self appointed guardian of wholesomeness and virtue, our very own Emily Post) by doing this.

You see, the day Jim L. chose to place his sign was a day on which the customer for whom we were building device X for, was in town to meet with us for a couple of days.

It was over in the afternoon before some rat went and told Secretary Lady about it. She immediately, at great risk of blindness, walked into the men's room and took down Jim's sign.

But the damage was done. The male representatives of that customer had seen the sign anyway.

They all thought it was a hoot.

From that day on, Secretary Lady kept a wary eye out for any unseemly shenanigans foisted on an otherwise unsuspecting engineering team.

All 6'3", 290 pounds of Jim L., well, actually he wasn't scared a bit.

But, the sign actually worked, and the floor in front of the urinals stayed clean.

For about 2 or 3 days.

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Stay tuned for more The Party Pooper's Guide® posts, right here on Least Significant Bits.

That is all. Carry on.

There IS Justice In The World!

(Thanks to Emily for writing about this or I'd never have known about it.)

Remember when President Bush wrecked a Segway thingamajig? He stepped onto one that wasn't on or something and it just tipped right over and they fell.

A newsman named Piers Morgan made repeated remarks about how dumb you have to be to wreck one of the things.

His paper, the Daily Mirror, ran the headline in 2003: "You'd have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn't you Mr President." It added: "If anyone can make a pig's ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can." So, it seems, can Mr Morgan.

That same man, in a prime example of cosmic justice, was photographed wrecking a Segway himself and breaking three ribs.

I hate to laugh at another man's pain, but that's FUNNY.

Here's and article with pictures.

Fun Facts (Well, not really, but that was the best title I could think of)

The company I work for is an engineer heavy company. That is, we tend to design, build, test, and produce custom electronics, so we have thousands of engineers working for us. Mostly related to satellite communications systems.

This company gives millions of dollars every year to Florida college's engineering programs at University of Central Florida, University of Florida, Florida Institute of Technology (here in Melbourne) and so forth.

They recruit from all over the country, frankly because engineers have generally been hard to come by for years. Consequently I've worked with guys with degrees from Purdue, Notre Dame, MIT, Ohio State, LSU, Louisiana Tech (me), Georgia Tech, New Mexico Tech, North Carolina State, Brigham Young, Tennessee, etc.

Today they sent out a company wide email to solicit help from any engineers interested in a program we have to go to local schools and encourage the high school age yunguns to consider engineering as a career.

The email had some facts in it that I didn't know. (I have taken the liberty of changing the "business speak" into plain English.)

- Decreased enrollment in Engineering and Computer Science

Freshman enrollment in Engineering has dropped for years now, and the trend seems that it will continue.

Computer Science and Engineering is one of the fastest growing occupations although it’s showing a 29% enrollment decline from ’02 to ’05.

The percentage of women enrolling in Engineering has been dropping for years, and the trend seems that it will continue.

Women are less interested in the largest engineering fields (Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science Engineering) and they gravitate towards industrial, biomedical, environmental, chemical engineering disciplines. (This is bad for our company because we don't use industrial, biomedical, environmental, or chemical engineers.)

Numbers of African-American and Hispanic college enrollment is low.

Minorities represent 25% of US population, yet they earn only 11% of all Bachelor of Science degrees.

- There are not enough people to replace the retiring current work force

78.2 million Baby Boomers start to retire in 2008 with 45 million genXer’s to replace and back fill

The thing that freaks me out about all of this is that I'm living proof that you don't have to be Albert Einstein to earn an engineering degree. I'm truly one of those people that people should look at and say, "Hey, if HE can do it, I can do it too. "

Yeah, it's a difficult curriculum, but the starting salary for a shiny, newly-minted engineering graduate is about $50k a year, and usually get a signing bonus too! There are young, single engineers that park in the parking lot in BMWs, Mercedes, etc. They ain't doing too bad.

I wish I had been making that kind of money when Lovely Wife and I first started out.

I Remember This Day

I was born in 1962, making me seven years old when Younger Brother was born in January of 1970.

I remember watching our parents with him, and even my Big Sis and Big Brother holding him.

For some reason, I thought it was so awesome when he would fall asleep while someone sat there in the living room and held him. So that became a bid deal for me; to be allowed to hold him AND for him to fall asleep while I was holding him.

Normally they would let me hold him and after a bit he would fidget and begin to cry and I sure as heck didn't know what to do with him then and they would take him from me.

But finally he actually fell asleep while I held him and Sainted Mother took a photo of us while he was asleep. He was a month old here and I was seven.

I was so proud. So last week when I came across this photo in a big envelope of photos that I've been scanning into digital form, I was taken back to that moment.

It's amazing how completely you can remember something from so long ago, and how seeing a picture brings it all rushing back.

I guess because I had such hopes that he would fall asleep while I held him and when it happended I was so excited. I think the emotion of it helped seal it in my memory, even if I haven't thought of it all that much over the years.

Pictures are amazing things to have from times past; especially of grandparents and other loved ones who have passed away.

The age difference between Younger Brother and me probably helped me have this strong protective feeling toward him, and added to my being so upset with him being hurt so badly recently.

I've been more in the mood to do this kind of work lately than to go out with my camera and take new stuff; to scan, clean up, and archive some of the old family photos.