One of my best friends is spending January in Panama with her husband and she’s been sending me daily journal updates of their days and activities. I’m not sure I want to spend a month away from home but the daily stories are making me a little envious.
Where would you like to spend a month?
Today’s post comes to us from Port Huron Steve.
I recently posted about discovering several hundred scanned slides from trips my erstwife and I took in the United Kingdom in 1974 and 1975. Most of the original slides were good, but the company that converted them to digital files did poor work. After being scanned the images were badly underexposed and had harsh tones. I spent five weeks editing the slides, making each image look nice, or at least much nicer.
Last Friday night my daughter invited me to her home to deliver a marathon slide show. I presented about 500 edited slides and explained the circumstances of taking them. I talked so long I lost my voice. As my daughter drove me home I realized, with some surprise, that I had just experienced a “perfect” evening.
This surprised me because I am not comfortable calling anything perfect. That is such an absolute word. My experience of life keeps showing me that everything we experience is good or bad in relative terms. I am skittish about absolute words and absolute judgements.
And yet the slideshow evening could not have been better. For a storyteller, an ideal moment involves telling stories to an adoring audience. For a photographer, sharing images with people who are thrilled to see them is total joy. For an old storyteller/photographer what could be better than an evening sharing old images and their stories with family members?
Actually, I learned that there is a way that such an evening could be even better. Something already “perfect” can become nicer.
On our first British Isles trip my erstwife and I spent three days in the Cotswolds. The Cotswolds are a region of England where the countryside and the villages are unimaginably charming. Visiting there feels like stepping into a Beatrix Potter storybook. Perhaps the most appealing Cotswold town is Bourton-on-the-water. Its homes and shops were built centuries ago with locally quarried rock. The architecture is consistent, dating to the same period, and perfectly charming. A little stream runs through the heart of town, with stone bridges arching over it. The honey-colored stone used for all buildings is offset by many by countless lush flower gardens.
Bourton has a famous model village. Local craftsmen created a perfect model of the town that includes all the homes, churches and shops just as they looked in the 1930s. Each building was recreated with meticulous detail at a one-to-nine scale. Topiary trees and shrubbery line the tiny stone buildings. The stream is there, of course, along with those cute bridges. While the model town is accurate in scale, a few buildings have been given big windows so visitors can peer inside to appreciate how perfectly the interiors have been duplicated.
Because the model village occupies a significant area, logic dictates that the model village has to include a miniature model of the model. And it does!
The cherry on top of my perfect evening was watching my grandson grasp the concept of an infinite regression of models within models. “Wait, Grampy,” Liam cried. “So the tiny town has a tiny model of the town in it? Whoa! That’s awesome! And does the tiny model of the model have its own tiny model?”
Yes! Of course it does! Liam’s smile improved an evening I thought could not be better.
What kind of day or event would be perfect for you?
On Wednesday I ran three errands over my lunch hour. When I got back to my desk, my cell phone was not in the pocket of my purse where I normally keep it. My very first thought was that I had left it at one of the errand locations. But then I thought about it and remembered that I hadn’t taken it out of my purse at any of those places.
Maybe it had fallen out of my purse in the car or on the way from my desk to the car. I went out, searched all through the car, including moving the seats forward and back to check underneath. Then I looked again. I emptied out my purse twice.
Then I decided to re-trace all my steps and drove back to all three of the places I had been over lunch. Weirdly, in all three places, the same spot I had parked in earlier was open when I arrived. I looked in the spots, looked under the cars on either side, went into each establishment and asked if anyone had turned a phone in. Nope.
Sadly I returned to my cube and over the next half hour discovered that my phone did not have any tracking capability turned on and then further discovered that for my particular phone there didn’t even seem to BE any tracking capability. I took a deep breath and suspended service and then called the phone company to see if perhaps they could track it from there end. All the while the cost of getting a new phone was running through my head and I was starting to make a mental list of all the information stored in the phone and how I was going to have to re-assemble it somehow.
While I was on the phone I thought I’d empty out the purse one last time. As I set the empty purse down on the desk, it “thunked”. I felt around and could feel the outline of the phone at the bottom. It was between the purse and the lining! The pocket that I normally put it in had a phone-sized hole and the phone had fallen through. The gal on the phone with me was really nice to me, reactivated my service and wished me a good rest of the day. I was so relieved, I could feel the weight falling away from shoulders – I almost shed a tear.
I got duct tape from the maintenance department and taped up the hole before I left the office.
What was the last thing you lost? Or found?
Last week Steve commented that he thought there was an interesting story as to why I have a beaded warthog. I’ll let you all decide.
About 15 years ago, I traveled to South Africa to do a site inspection with a client. Like usual, I arrived a day ahead to make sure everything is all set for the client. The next morning, after I had met with the hotel and the ground supplier, I got a call from the States. The client and the account executive couldn’t get out of Cincinnati due to a huge ice storm. By the time they would be able get to South Africa, it would pretty much be time to turn around and head home. Believe me, traveling to South Africa is a long haul, so you don’t want to go there to come home immediately!
So the next six days were almost like a vacation including great food and even a little shopping time. I had already found a Nelson Mandela t-shirt for YA (this trip was the week after he passed away), but since there wasn’t a client, my driver and I started taking time to stop at roadside stands as we drove around. It was at one of these stands that I found the beaded warthog.
It’s very common to find beaded animals in South Africa. The locals use reclaimed/recycled wire to sculpt the bodies and then use little glass beads to do the decoration. Elephants make up the majority of these beaded souvenirs, but you can also find giraffes, lions and rhinos. I had never seen a warthog before (and haven’t since either) and it struck me as hysterical because the missing client worked for the swine division of a husbandry pharmaceutical company. I forked over the money happily and added it to the little store of items I had bought for the client.
When I got back to my office, I called the account exec to let him know that I was doing some good notes and also sending the gift items to the client. Since I thought the beaded warthog was so funny I mentioned it specifically. There was an awkward pause and he said “You know, she doesn’t have nearly as good a sense of humor as you.” When I pushed him about what he meant, he broke down and said that she was very sensitive about the pig connection and he didn’t think sending the warthog would be a good idea. He was worried that this would hurt my feelings. Ha – just the opposite – I got a great insight into a client I hadn’t worked with before AND now I have a beaded warthog!
Have you ever had a gift go wrong?
Today’s post comes to us from Port Huron Steve
In the summer of 1974 my parents invited my erstwife and me to a dinner. They explained that my dad had made a serious amount of money recently, much more than they needed. There could be no happier use of that money, they said, than to send us to London “all expenses paid.” We wouldn’t need to spend a dime of our own money for two weeks of touring London.
Of course we were thrilled. We were grad students eking out a living with on-campus jobs at the University of Minnesota. This gift would let us live like rich people for two weeks. Even better, we realized there was enough money enough to allow us to travel around the United Kingdom. Instead of staying in a posh London hotel, as my parents had anticipated, we could sleep in B&Bs in the countryside. The money saved would cover a cheap rental auto. We could travel wherever our whims directed.
Our two-week vacation in September featured a week of exploring London and a week of bumbling about the country. We visited Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Devon and Dorset. We nipped into Wales briefly, which was funny. The Welsh were astonished that tourists would intentionally enter their country. They had no infrastructure to accommodate us, and we didn’t stay long.
We took hundreds of photos. Photography was trickier then than now. We shot slide film, a touchy and unforgiving medium. Our Fujichrome slides weren’t as pretty as Kodachrome, and they had gobs of grain. The British weather did us no favors, raining every day. The fugitive sun made a brief appearance three times. When not raining the skies remained overcast and harshly bright. Our slides were drab, with unpleasant tonality.
You can’t view slides without a slide projector, screen and dark room. Several years ago I hired a company to scan our slides, converting them to digital files. When I got the scans I was dismayed. The scanning process was crude. All the scans were underexposed and grainy, with ugly colors and tones.
A few weeks ago I came across those scans where they’d been hiding in a remote file on my computer. I opened a scan in my photo editing software. It was easy to brighten the image. I made some areas of the image darker, lightening others. I tweaked some colors. I tamed the harsh sky. My editing software has ways of reducing grain. Soon I had a new version of the slide that was pretty, or at least prettier than it had been. Some scans were too compromised to salvage, but that left nearly 200 scans that begged for a beauty makeover. With a big grin I began editing the 1974 trip images.
That kicked off three of the happiest weeks I’ve known. Because my computer is attached to good speakers I could stream an internet folk music broadcast while I worked.
Photo editing is tricky. I kept returning to images I had edited earlier, tweaking them, and often making my edits more subtle. Of course, no amount of editing can make fuzzy images sharp. Many things can go wrong in photography. I was puzzled by an icky color cast in pictures of suits of armor. I finally figured out that the armor was in a room lit with fluorescent lights, giving the metal a green cast. Aha! That could be fixed. In the end I produced 189 pleasing images.
The project was emotionally complicated. I was having so much fun I tuned out the horror show of our national politics. It was a joy to revisit moments from that extraordinary trip 44 years ago. Each image presented unique challenges, old memories and surprising rewards. Christmas—actually, a splendid Christmas—came and went. I was almost too absorbed with editing to pay it much attention. I was too busy making ugly things prettier. What is more rewarding than that?
Do you have ways to add beauty to your life?
A little over three years ago, Dale wrote a piece when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft approached and photographed Pluto. He included several nice photos and gave us an update on the PTA (Pluto Tourism Association) about groups wanted to book some serious vacation time on the planet (or whatever Pluto is categorized as this week).
Today, after 3 years, New Horizons is doing a flyby of 2014 MU69; it will be the most distant object every visited by a spacecraft. Even NASA realizes that 2014MU69 is a terrible name – they have nicknamed the object, an icy Kuiper Belt object, Ultima Thule, which means “distant places beyond the known world”.
Scientists are not sure if Ultima Thule is one object or two objects circling each other and are hoping this flyby, which will happen at a whooping 31,500 mph, will clear up that mystery. After the New Year’s flyby, it will take a full 6 hours for the radio signals to arrive back at earth.
It’s amazing to me that just 117 years after our first machine-powered flight, we will be waiting for signals from a spacecraft that has traveled a billion miles since it passed Pluto three years ago. I wonder if we’ll still be getting signals in three more years when it is a billion miles farther from Earth and if we will be vacationing on 2014 MU69 by that point?
Have you ever had a speeding ticket?
A couple of weeks ago our church office received an email from an event coordinator who works for Carnegie Hall. She had been searching out bell choirs online, found ours, and asked if we would be interested in playing at The Great Christmas Ring next year. We would perform with about 250 other ringers in early December at Carnegie Hall after several days of rehearsals with an eminent bell choir conductor and composer. They will provide the bells and equipment, and we just pay for everything else.
Six of us have expressed interest, and will submit our applications this week. Participation is on a first come-first serve basis, so we hope we get in. I think it will be pretty exciting. It will not be the first time I played Carnegie Hall, however.
When I was 18 I auditioned for and played in a concert band comprised of high school students from all over the US. We played a concert in Carnegie Hall prior to a European tour. It was quite an experience. I didn’t really appreciate my surrounding s when I was 18, so if we get to play bells in New York next December I will pay much closer attention.
If you could perform anything, anywhere, even in the past, where would you perform and with whom would you perform? What famous concerts do you wish you could have attended?
On my way to work on Friday I was deep in thought and suddenly looked up to see a police cruiser on the side of the road – I was going 37 instead of 30. I immediately took my foot off the gas, but as I looked into the rear view mirror, I saw the cruiser pulling away from the curb and the flashing lights starting up.
All kinds of thoughts went through my brain: I don’t want to pay for a ticket, I don’t want any points on my license, do red cars get more tickets, I’m going to be late for work, what if I cry when the officer comes to my window.
Luckily someone in the other lane just behind me must have been going a bit faster than I was when we passed the radar; the cop pulled the other car over. I feel like I dodged a bullet and I went the speed limit all the way to work after that.
Have you ever gotten a traffic ticket of any kind?
The weekend post comes to us from CrystalBay.
I have increasing anxiety about driving after dark, so I decided to scope out Lyft. I couldn’t figure out how to use the app to determine the cost of being driven to the few locations that I regularly go to. After messing around for half an hour, I decided to order a ride because then the price would pop up. My clever plan was to then immediately cancel it. The problem, however, is that I couldn’t figure out how to cancel it!
Within minutes, Jeff texted he’d be here in ten minutes. I called him directly to cancel, explaining what I’d done. Two minutes later, Amy texted she’d be here in five minutes. I again called her to cancel. Three minutes later, Tom called saying that he was pulling up in my driveway! I told him my woe story and he showed me how I could use the app, then mentioned that each canceled ride had cost me $5. Altogether, I’d just lost $15 because of not understanding how to use this app. What still troubles me is that, after my initial call canceling, other drivers kept coming. I wondered how many more would show up.
The good news is finding out that, between here and Navarre, where 90% of my needs are met, Lyft only cost 87 cents!
What technologies have challenged (or defeated) you??
Trail Baboon 