More memories...

More memories ... from my mom's photo collection...

First up: a photo I'm not sure how my sister will react to!  This is my sister Holly and her high school prom date (I have no idea who he was).  The photo isn't dated, but Holly must have graduated in '70 or '71, so presumably that's when this was taken.  On the back, in my mom's handwriting: “Holly Prom, Mom made dress”.  Somehow it reminds me of Hermione Granger entering the Yule Ball with her date. :)

 My mom wrote “Holly” on the back; I guess she thought we wouldn't know (really, mom?).  It's another of those undated studio portraits, probably from school.  I'm guessing she's 13 or 14 in the photo, making this circa '69.

It must be a Holly day, because here's my sister again!  This one is (obviously) much more recent than the two preceding photos.  It's undated and unmarked, and I've no idea what the location is, or anything else about the photo.  Maybe Holly can enlighten us?

Oh my gosh, here's yet another Holly photo!  Again, my mom must have thought we wouldn't recognize her: she wrote “Holly” on the back.  It's another one of those undated, unmarked studio portraits, I'm guessing from the year prior to the second photo above, so circa '68.

This is my brother Mark and his wife Gina, I'm assuming from their wedding in Cancun.  This reminds me very much of my favorite photo of Debbie and I, walking together down the sand in Solana Beach, California.  The photo is dated (by the lab) October 2007, which may actually be correct.  Maybe one of my siblings can fill me in on their wedding date.

Finally, here's a photo of a good family friend.  On the back, in my mom's handwriting: “Tillie Bard Lincoln Maine”.  The photo is undated, but the sticker in the upper right says “Class ‘61”.  That must be her high school class, and I'm assuming this is a photo taken during her graduation year.  I have lots of good memories of Tillie, mainly from the mid-to-late '60s – one very nice lady...

Salt-lick camera captures...

Salt-lick camera captures...  At right are three girls from our neighbors.  The oldest, in the middle, is actually our neighbor's kid.  The other two are twins, cute as can be, kids of the sister of the mom of our neighbor.  Shortly after I moved into our house here, while the remodeling was happening, the smallest girl (on the left) saw me one day – and came running over to me, wrapper her arms around my legs in a big hug, and loudly said “I love you Tom!”  So far as I know, I had never done anything worthy of such affection.  But it sure put a smile on my face! :)

We also captured a buck, early yesterday morning:

Academic self-censorship...

Academic self-censorship...  I read things like this and despair ... until I remember that there are places still in the U.S. – like here in northern Utah – where testosterone is still abundant and normative.  One doesn't hear about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” around here.  Any student who couldn't take (say) the sight of a historical photography of Nazi concentration camp victims (as in the linked article) would most likely be laughed right out of a classroom.

The testosterone-depleted “delicate snowflake” world that apparently exists in a large part of our academia is so different than our experience here that it is sometimes difficult to believe it really exists – until I run into it head-on.  That first happened to me about two years ago, when I started to get comments on my blog posts from offended people; now these are the majority of all comments posted.  I used to answer them, but that was a futile endeavor.  Now I simply delete the post and block the author.  Much easier.  I see the delicate snowflakes on Twitter all the time; so far as I can tell, the tweets aren't satire, they're serious.  So they really must exist, despite their non-existence around here.

What happens to the U.S. when the delicate snowflakes are adults, and in the majority?  That's really hard for me to fathom.  Do we end up with a bifurcated culture, wherein one isolated group of people (possessed of the majority of the testosterone) do all the jobs too rough-and-tumble for the delicate snowflakes?

Camoufleur...

Camoufleur...  That was a new word for me, until this morning.  It means “one who camouflages”.  I came across it in the context of an article on U.S. women camoufleurs of WWI who practiced in the parks of New York City.  That was an entirely new piece of WWI lore for me!  This article is quite interesting, and includes a number of photographs (like the example at right) of camouflaged women testing various techniques.

Camouflage is one technique for military deception.  The success of deception programs in general has fascinated me ever since I first read of Patton's ghost army in WWII.  That was an incredibly successful deception that contributed significantly to the Allied victory.  Such military deceptions have been a vital part of strategy since the earliest recorded wars, though they perhaps reached their peak in WWII...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Well, today wasn't the easy day of progress on the mud room's electrical wiring that I was hoping for.  For starters, yesterday I cracked (again!) the plate for the motion detector.  I threw it in the trash and spent several hours fabricating a new one from scratch.  This took much longer than I anticipated because I had to make two runs: one for a jigsaw blade, and another for scroll saw blades (the latter run took me all the way into Logan).  However, I did take some photos of the process this time.

The steps involved were:

1. Cut the blank (a 7" x 7" section of 2x8).
2. Rough-cut a 4" hole in the center of the blank, using a drill and scroll saw.
3. Turn the blank in the lathe to get the hole exactly right, using trial fittings to test it.  It took me four tries to get that right. :)
4. Use the router to put a 1/2" radius on the front face corners.
5. Use a Fortsner bit in the drill press to mill two holes to recess the “ears”.
6. Sand.
7. Paint with KILZ primer.

Tomorrow after the primer is dry, I'll be drilling pilot holes for the screws.  They're just too big in diameter to safely screw into this wood.

I also mounted a new entry set (latch and lock) on the door between our laundry room and our garage.  The old set had worn out.  Naturally, after I took the old set off I discovered that the hole for the lock was not the standard (2 1/8") diameter.  To make it more challenging, the door is a steel security door.  Sigh.  So I used a jigsaw with a metal blade to enlarge the hole to the right size.  That was surprisingly challenging to do; the uneven surface of the door made it hard to keep the jigsaw upright.  I solved that problem by using a small piece of plywood as a flat platform for the saw.  I needed about three hands to do that!

This afternoon I had a lovely walk with the puppies.  To switch things up, I walked them through a new part of the neighborhood to our northwest.  We met lots of new dogs, several new adults, and a few curious kids.  Most surprising was the kitty who came running out to meet the new puppies!

More memories...

More memories ... from my mom's photo collection...

On the back, in my mom's fountain pen handwriting: “Buster Patterson Sister Lillian’s Son”.  That confirms that my mom had a sister (and I had an aunt) Lillian, and she had a son named Buster.  I do have a vague memory of someone named Buster – whether just from talk or having met him, I can't recall.  The photo is undated, but from the cars I'd say it's late '50s or early '60s.

This young man is named Demming Sennett.  On the back, in my mom's handwriting: “Demming Sennett Tom’s ‘Little Brother'”.  My dad was a volunteer for the Big Brother program for many years.  He had a longer relationship with Demming than with any of the other kids he helped.  I'm sorry to say that our family has lost touch with Demming – it would be good to know how he's doing.  The photo is undated, but from his apparent age I'd guess it was taken from the mid-to-late '70s.  I didn't know Demming well, as dad started with him after I'd left home to join the Navy.  I did meet him several times on my visits home, including one all-day trip he and I took with my dad to the mountains (or so the New Jersey natives style them) in northern New Jersey.

This is me, in an undated studio portrait.  I'm still surprised by how many studio portraits my mom had of us kids.  I don't remember sitting for so many photos!  If I'm eight or so in this photo, then it was taken circa '60.  The awful color balance is due to the cheap photo paper, much faded on which it was printed.  One thing that strikes me: I see no hint of my adult face in my childhood photos, while I do in the photos of my siblings.  Is that just me, or did my appearance really change more than theirs?

My brother Scott, clamming in Maine.  If you're not familiar with this activity, for kids it basically means walking out into deep black mud and digging with your hands for the clams.  Adults do it (usually) with shovels or clam rakes, and wearing boots in a (usually) futile attempt to stay clean.  Kids ... just revel in the muck.  I remember some photos of Scott and I doing the same thing, but quite a bit younger – haven't found them yet.  The lab dates this as December 1959, but it was almost certainly from the summer of that year instead, when Scott would have been five and a half.  The perfect age to be sent out into black mud!

On the back, in my mom's handwriting: “Donnie Over”.  That would be her sister (my aunt) Betty's son (and my cousin) Donnie, the one I can't remember.  The photo is undated.  Note the heavy load of Brylcreem! :)

This photo is a bit of a mystery to me.  It's undated, on the back in my mom's handwriting it says “Paul Jay”.  I don't recall ever hearing that name before.  The location I can identify: that's Long Pond in Maine, with some typical “camps” along the shore.  The man whose shoulder is visible in the foreground could easily be my grandfather Donald MacLaughlin, though not enough is visible to be certain of that.

The lab dates this photo as April 1960.  In my mom's handwriting on the back: “Bus Sturgeon Lincoln Maine”.  I remember that gas station – perhaps Bus owned it?  My clearest memory of it is in the repair bay, where over the tools there was a Ridgid advertising calendar. :)  I also remember the fascinating collection of mysterious tools, automobile repair specialties that we didn't have on the farm.  I don't really remember Bus at all.

Finally, here's a nice studio portrait of my brother Scott.  It's undated, but I'll guess he's seven, making this taken circa '61.  His face is recognizably similar to his adult face.  I sure remember those incredibly thick plastic-framed glasses – I had a pair just like them!  Scott in a suit is a rather disconcerting sight, though – a bit like seeing a marmot wearing dress shoes...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Well, it now seems pretty certain that we are more regularly visited by deer than we thought.  Here's the “take” from our trail camera from last night:

The photos are time-stamped; our visitors appeared from just before midnight until just after 3 am.  Night-owls, to be sure!

The trail camera also caught about a bazillion photos of our neighbor's dog Annie, plus this one shot of a kitty (at right).  There were also perhaps a hundred frames that showed no animals of any kind – I'm guessing those were triggered by birds flying across the field of vision so fast that they were missed, or perhaps by the wind blowing branches around.

This morning when I was doing the kitty chores, I saw the rather startling sight at right (the rightmost photo).  That's a kitty litter jug, filled with water, acting as a weight on the cardboard box below it.  That cardboard box, in turn, stops one of our cats (Konani, aka “Devil Cat”) from playing with the controls for the air filter below it.  That jug is glowing as if it has a light bulb in it, but it certainly does not.  So what was going on? The other photo, from the opposite side, shows that the jug is illuminated by a small ray of sunlight poking in from a basement window.  This particular alignment only lasted 60 seconds or so.  Pretty cool while it lasted!  Even some of the cats were intrigued, and the aforementioned Konani went over and smacked at the jug to see what would happen (nothing!).

I spent most of today working on the electrical wiring for our new mud room.  I had one small disaster occur while working today: the plate for the motion sensor split in two places while I was screwing it in.  I'll have to make that one over again; a job for tomorrow.  The plates for the lights themselves are in, as you can see in the rightmost photo.  It's not obvious at the moment, but the doorway will actually be much larger than the existing hole; those lights will be slightly closer to the door than they are to the edge of the mud room.  Inside the mud room I have all the boxes in place except for the three outlet boxes on the east side.  The chandelier box is installed, and I'm very happy with the way that came out.  Much of the wiring is in place, including the fairly complicated wiring for the lighting controller.  There is also one more switch box to install, but I can't do that until we receive the front door, so I know which side it will open on (that's the side where the switch will go).  The left photo shows a small bit of detail that was interesting to work out.  The junction box is just a distribution junction for outlets; nothing exciting there.  But see that vertical row of steel plates?  Those are “stud guards”, intended to be hammered into a stud to prevent nails from puncturing a wire or pipe underneath it, where it transits the stud through a drilled hole.  I'm using them for a completely different purpose here.  I cut a channel in the OSB sheathing behind those plates, and routed three Romex cables through that channel.  Just before they get to the bottom of the steel, the three wires plunge through the insulation between the studs.  I'm hoping I can talk the electrical inspector into accepting that.  I have a good story all queued up! :)  The inspectors here are quite common-sensical, so I'm not really too worried about that.  One of those cables carries power for all the mud room's lighting, another connects to a three-way switch inside our house, and the last one carries power to an outlet box below.

More memories...

More memories ... from my mom's photo collection...

This photo is undated, but from my dad's appearance I'd guess it's the late '90s or early '00s; he'd have been about 75.  I recognize that jacket – he had it on several of the trips we took together, and often wore it in the cabins or B&B we stayed in: he liked to be warm.  It's a bit unusual for him to have been out in bright sunlight without a hat – he was always careful about provoking the skin cancers that he hated getting “burned” out (with liquid nitrogen).  There are a few other photos in this series that I'll post later; they include other people I don't know, but I'm guessing they were other horticulturists at some sort of function, possibly when my dad got an award.  He's standing in front of a specimen of American holly (Ilex opaca), the plant species he spent so much time studying and growing; I'm sure that background is not accidental.  It wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that it was one of his varieties.

The lab dates this as August 1960; that's my dad and my brother Scott.  They would have been 34 and six and a half, respectively.  The fuzz visible below my dad's chin is glued to the original photo somehow; I was afraid to try to remove it.  I love the expression on both their faces.  I have so many memories of my dad's smile, with his jutting lower jaw and those wrinkles like a cartoon character...

This photo is undated, but from the gifts and some other photos I've already posted, I can say it's the Christmas of '55, taken in our living room.  This one was taken before we opened the gifts – my guess is that mom or dad snapped this on Christmas Eve after they set all this up.  One thing I see here I remember: the little Christmas trees just under the right side of the real Christmas tree.  Those were decorations that we had for years afterward.  To the right and behind the Christmas tree, you can get a good view of the closet we had in that space before my parents had a games closet installed high.  Inside that closet you see there was a very awkwardly shaped space created by the ceiling of the stairwell for the stairs down to our basement.  Sometime after '55, they took out the frame of that door and paneled it up with matching knotty pine paneling, making a fairly well-hidden and high built-in cabinet that we used for storing board games and the like.  I remember the carpenters trying hard to match the paneling when they did that work – I learned a few words I'd never heard before. :)  That brings up another memory of mom and dad: when we were young, it was very rare for us to hear either of them utter any word more vulgar than, say, “Darn!”  As an adult I discovered (as did my siblings) that both of them had a rather well-developed set of four-letter word vocabularies – my dad's mostly acquired during the war, in the Army Air Force, and my mom's from her dad and his circle of friends.  My own vulgabulary gained more from them than I was ever able to teach them. :)

The lab dates this as February 1954, and my mom wrote “Tom” on the back.  That's my dad standing in front of a magnificent Ilex opaca specimen on our farm.  I remember that particular tree; it stood along our driveway to the north of our house, and was a particularly fine example of the variety “Old Heavyberry”, which was discovered and developed by his dad (my grandfather) Earle Dilatush.  That particular specimen was one of the last of the large hollies on our farm that was sold and moved – labor got too expensive after that, and the giant tree-moving equipment available today hadn't yet been developed.

 This little fellow is my cousin Donald, son of my uncle (my mom's brother) Donald.  I don't remember ever meeting him.  The photo is undated.  My mom wrote on the back, in fountain pen “Donald MacLaughlin son of my brother Donald”.  Because of the fountain pen, I'm guessing it's circa early '50s.

My sister Holly, in an undated and unmarked studio portrait, possibly a school portrait.  I'm guessing she's about five or six, which would put this in '60 or '61.  I think I may have posted one much like this before, but I can't find it now.  The mark on her forehead is damage on the photo original, not on her head (though such an injury might explain some things :).  I'm sure you didn't miss it, but just in case: that's quite a gap in her teeth she's got there! :)

This one has handwriting I don't recognize, saying “The reason for the frown is a bad head-ache.” – followed by my mom's writing, in fountain pen: “Donnie Over”.  My mom's sister (my aunt) Betty was married to William Over, so I'm presuming that Donnie is their son (so my cousin).  I don't remember a cousin Donnie, though.  The photo is undated, but from the Army uniform he's wearing, it must be WWII or Korean War era – mid-'40s to mid-'50s.  There are sailors in dress blues in the background, and a ship, so I'm guessing he's at a port either returning from or going to a troop transport.  The plants look more like east coast than west coast (assuming this is in the U.S.); beyond that I can't tell what the location is.  Another clue on the time: note that the can of soda or beer he's holding is an old-fashioned steel can with the rolled lid.

I've been wondering...

I've been wondering...  If one was the parent of a teenager right now, precisely how would you be talking with your child about this election?  I might be talking with them about the need for a passport, and most definitely there would be weapons training...