Faux-Tographer
Other attempts at pictures besides the baby
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Saturday, September 02, 2006
Mmmm… Pizza
Last night was pizza night; our normal Papa Ginos order of a rustic meat combo and large traditional cheese, with the AAA discount. Val got her first chance to gnaw on pizza bones, and her first taste of pizza cheese, which was also her first taste of cheese, which we decided after her checkup it was time for her to start trying. She needs the fat and calories even more than Sadie did.
Sadie hadn’t eaten to speak of all day, and kept refusing food. She’d woken up too early and had a cranky day. We gave her a primo piece of the meat combo, which she picks much of the meat off of, but she wasn’t that excited by it. My theory was that she wanted a slice of plain pizza, so I got her one.
To our amazement, for the first time ever she picked up the slice, held it like a big person and started taking bites point first. This called for the camera!
The camera all too often disappoints me by getting an awesome shot but making it blurry. I’ll take six pictures of one of them, get one that has a smile or is otherwise superlative, and the camera will have failed me just on that one. Focusing is automated, which also means it takes the picture when it’s good and ready so I miss an outrageous number of “snap it now before the moment has passed” shots. Sometimes video recording refuses to turn on at all, no matter how many times I press the button or how long I hold it down.
The first shot of Sadie with the pizza caught an uncharacteristic smile and was a great picture, but so blurry I wouldn’t ordinarily post it, and wouldn’t make a print out of it. I was so mad I decided to experiment with touching it up. I use Paint Shop Pro 5.
Here’s the fuzzy original (which actually isn’t as bad as a lot of the ruined ones I get):
Here’s the result of surprisingly little modification:
Click the pictures above for larger instances in a new window.
Still not perfect, but better. I was intrigued to see what I could do. Oh, she devoured that entire slice!
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Family Pictures
Here are some great pictures of several nieces and nephews.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Also On August 19th…
Today would have been the 100th birthday of my father’s father, unless I’ve had his year of birth wrong for all the years.
It would also have been my brother’s 33rd anniversary with his first wife, who knocked him up just before he turned 18, had they stayed married, but we don’t need to talk about that.
If I recall correctly, my grandfather was 84 when he died. I keep thinking he was 86, but that can’t be because of where I lived at the time. In any event, here are a couple of pictures. In the first one, he’s in the middle, with guys he worked with, probably on a farm. In the second one, he’s in my uncle’s van at an Ellis family reunion at Green Provicial Park in Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Memorial Surprise
Here’s the town hall, with a large lawn and the obligatory major monument to the war of northern aggression out front:
On that large lawn is an impressive, newer-fangled war memorial, seen walking toward it and then facing into it:
Besides the main memorial at the back, the perimeter is line with granite benches, each for a war or conflict and apparently sponsored by some person or group, interspersed with some black monuments like this one:
That’s the most distinctive, war-specific of the black stones. Mostly they are generically “hooray for the VFW,” “in memory of the disabled,” that sort of thing.
Each of the benches represent a conflict. You expect some, like:
Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, naturally you’d expect World War II and the War of 1812, not to mention many others. Around here it’s no surprise at all to see this:
This was where it was at, after all. In Halifax alone there’s a stone marker on White Island, commemorating the start of King Philip’s War (or whatever it says exactly; it’s been forever since I read it), and there’s a memorial on Thompson Street, route 105, where the Thompson homestead was destroyed. So yeah, King Philip’s War fits.
But this made us do a double-take:
A memorial to the Texas Revolution? In Middleborough, Massachusetts? One of these things is not like the others. Must have been a family connection or something.
Not that it isn’t cool, but what a surprise.
Well They Tell Me I Was Born There…
As we continue the tour of scenic Star’s Hollow Middleboro, here’s a not very good set of pictures of the boarded up hospital formerly known as St. Lukes, which is where I careened heedlessly into the world on my mother’s 26th birthday, unaware what I was in for.
The first and third pictures are brightened, and the first, just in case, has smudged license plates, which are something that will happen without mention in other pictures as appropriate.
I didn’t go up onto Oak Street to get a good picture of the long side of the building. That’s where it looks most shamefully empty. Every time we go by it we talk about how sad that something isn’t being done with it. Someone was trimming growth as we walked by, so I wondered if that was a good sign.
My first doctor when I was a baby and for my first several years was located in a house-like building near this place. He also delivered the landlord’s wife, I learned when I used the “born in Middleboro” card while trying to ensure that we, not anyone else, would be rented this apartment.
The building looks so little to me now! It seemed so big when I was a kid, when we visited my aunt when she was having her gallbladder removed.
Of Trains And History
We walked a couple miles yesterday, and I remembered to take the camera along. This was not enough for Sadie, so she also played in the sandbox for a while afterward, then went with me and hung out in and around the server room and an attorney’s office while I did some work. She is soooo good, being able to do that. Though the lollipop I snagged her from the reception desk didn’t hurt.
This set is the view from two bridges over the railroad tracks looking roughly north, then from adjacent to another bridge looking roughly south. This is the trainyard area near enough to us to fill the apartment with diesel fumes when certain engines idle there, viewed from opposite directions.
In the first pictures, the more spiffed up looking stretches are the ones used by the MBTA commuter rail, which terminates not far beyond these bridges.
The third picture is retouched, brightened 15% because the camera was acting up. Though not as much as it did later, when it corrupted several pictures and ruined my getting a complete war memorial set. The card has now been reformatted and we’re going to order a new, higher capacity one.
In that last picture, the decrepit building to the left of the tracks is the old C.P. Washburn building. I’d noticed they were no longer open for business, but I had no idea why. This is significant because when I was growing up, when they also had a store near us in Halifax, right beside the same railroad tracks, they were the oldest continuously operated family business in America. Besides being a long separate branch of the same Washburn family my father’s mother was from.
This post made me look into it and I learned what happened:
As the survey progressed, we were, of course, eager to learn which is the oldest existing family business in America. The answer seemed easy: the C.P. Washburn Company (1632) of Middleborough, Massachusetts. Then came the crushing news: on November 1, 1998, The Boston Globe reported the company’s untimely demise. Charles P. Washburn IV, a member of the 11th generation, was apparently unable to pay $120,000 in back taxes and the town closed the company’s doors, bringing an end to a noble family business that got its start as a granary in nearby Duxbury, long before this country became a nation.
In the course of this, I also came across an interesting list of historic sites for Middleboro and other towns in Plymouth County.
Another Washburn building is among those historic sites, as is basically the entire part of town where we live, which includes the post office, which is itself a distinct historic site, which would fit with my taking a picture of it because it looks so cool.
As the above implies, there will be more pictures, including a war memorial curiosity I managed to photograph, even though I didn’t collect the complete set. Stay tuned…
Thursday, August 17, 2006
You Know You Have Kids When…
Snakes on a Plane? Amateurs. Here we have crayons in a speaker:
This ancient set of computer speakers I bought years ago for my Pentium 200, after I bought a SoundBlaster Gold card for it. Since that sound card has traditional speaker jacks and these speakers have the same, the two go together. I use the speaker cables from a stereo I bought at Zayre in or around 1978.
Because the computer has not been hooked up, the speakers have been kicking around near my desk. Both kids loved playing with them.
When I went to hook them up the other day, I found the controls had fallen into the case, barely lining up with the holes. Not useful. So I opened it up to fix it, and the picture is what I saw; crayons everywhere! Apparently Sadie had been pushing crayons into the speaker unobserved. You’ll notice that no crayon is allowed to remain clothed. The wrappers must be torn methodically off each and every one as soon as possible. She’s so funny.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Pictures!
There are mass quantities of pictures of the family, including Sadie, Valerie, and most of their 16 first cousins and my three grandnieces, over on my brother’s front page currently, specifically in this post, this post, and this post. They are significant as these were two “must bring camera” events for which I idiotically forgot it entirely.
I’d hesitated to point them out earlier, as the original two posts had “straight of the camera” files sizes of give or take a megabyte for each picture, so it was noticably slow even with FiOS. They and all the new ones have been shrunk to more standard web page file sizes, so page load shouldn’t even be that horrible with dialup.
Go see!
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Happy Birthday
To my cousin Andy’s daughter Casey, who is a year old today.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Da Girls
So what I’d really like is to spend my weekend with these two:
But I mostly have to spend it with these two:
Oh well. And off to it…
Monday, July 24, 2006
Happy Birthday
To my mother’s cool sister, my aunt Bea. She was the youngest, and my mother 2nd oldest, making the age difference small enough for me to remember Bea babysitting us when she was still a teenager, and I can remember her wedding reception, held around the corner from where we live now.
Here she is last summer, followed by a bonus picture of her son, my cousin Andy, and her first grandchild, Andy’s daughter Casey, taken on June 25th.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
History
This is my father when he was young. Young enough to have hair! He lost his mighty early. I am amazed how much he reminds me of my cousins Wally and Chad. Not to mention my brother and my oldest nephew.
In the wagon are my late aunt Joan and my aunt Jean, who gave me a copy of this picture, of which this is a digital photo. A scan would be better, but this was expedient. I’m not sure how old they all were, but my father was already well beyond they age when he had polio.
Friday, July 07, 2006
Sadie Makes Fark
Sadie has been Farked. Learned via Jen, whose blog is the background of the picture in question. It’s the picture from this post.
I signed up for a Fark account so I could leave a comment telling people, well… this:
Just to let everyone know, that’s a picture of my daughter (not a boy, short hair at the time notwithstanding), Sadie, from a series I took and posted at Accidental Verbosity of her “reading” different blogs on my monitor. The one with Jen’s (Lintefiniel Musings) was probably the best of those. It was posted on July 18, 2005, so she’d have been just short of 10 months old at the time.
I just love a lot of these and will have to save them for her to see when she’s old enough to appreciate it.
Trouble is, it won’t let you comment for the first 24 hours after signing up. Sheesh.
Some of you might enjoy checking them out. They can be freaky, but mostly they’re quite cool and downright LOL amusing.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
A Walk On The Howland Side
This is my great-grandmother, Sarah “Sadie” Margaret Tranmer nee Howland. She died in April 1971,around the time I turned 10. Which means she lived to be just short of 75; younger than I always thought. These are great pictures, exactly as I remember her, reflecting her personality. Reportedly she was a real wise-ass, could cut you to ribbons with her tongue, but would do anything to help you if you needed it.
She married James Edmund Tranmer, and they had six kids, my grandmother, Hazel Margaret, being the oldest. The others were Richard, Natalie, Ellery, Winona, and Shirley. Besides my grandmother, only her sister Winnie and one cousin, Dutchy, remain alive out of that generation.
My great grandfather was a rogue, so besides who knows how many local “milkman” spawn, he hopped the train, ran off and had more than one other family, including one in Connecticut that’s been in touch with my mother to compare information. He reportedly was involved in early computer systems for the government.
More stuff about Howland genealogy, at some length, follows the pictures…
So last night I’m going through these pictures I took of sheets of pictures my mother got from some relatives who are also part of the whole Howland lineage. Forever it’s been “known” that one of the Howlands married a Wampanoag indian woman, and she’s one of my ancestors a few generations back. Most recently my understanding was she’d have been my great-great-great grandmother. Yet looking at what I had on record for names, that would have made her Philena Haskins, which sounded not like an indian’s name. I called to ask my mother more about it, and she thought her name might have been Keturah, married to Malachi Howland, one generation back from Seth Howland, who was born in 1789) and Philena Haskins (who was his second wife). Trouble is, you go back too far and it’s not possible to have a picture like this:
Which may or may not be the ancestor in question, and may or may not be an indian ancestor in the Ashley line instead.
So I enthusiastically found Malachi Howland and Keturah, whose name in this case was Howland because they were cousins, not boding well for the indian idea. I gave my mother their entire lineage, available easily online, back to 1481. Then I poked around more and got suspicious about the fact that those two were listed as having no kids, not to mention that they moved from Middleboro to Manhattan, and that meant the lineage had to make its way back to Massachusetts. I found evidence that they had one daughter, but that’s it.
Later I found a near-match of our own lineage that I could match us to, with a totally different path up the Howland lineage to the same place. Starting with my great-grandmother’s parents and going down the generations of paternal parentage, that one went:
Seth A. Howland
Emily Martha Ashley
Seth Howland
Philena Haskins (2nd wife; 1st wife was Abigail Ashley, Seth A. was youngest of a grand total of 15 children)
Joshua Howland
Abigail Pierce (see paragraph below)
Joshua Howland
Mary Allen
Joshua Howland
Elizabeth Holloway (one source had her spelled Halloway, which is apparently wrong)
Samuel Howland
Mary Sampson
Henry Howland Jr
Mary Newland
Henry Howland Sr
Margaret Aires
John Howland
Emma Revell
John Howland
Agnes Greenway
John Howland b.1481
Agnes Agnette
The trouble is, if I went to the seemingly better source on overall Howland lineage up to a few generations ago, or less, depending, and come down from the top, I came up to the third Joshua being married to Phebe Chase, so I thought my conclusion was wrong. I also thought I had too long a break between a couple of the generations. However, it turned out that Phebe Chase was third Joshua Howland’s first wife, with whom he had four girls, including that same Keturah who married Malachi, and the online source I was treating as particularly comprehensive and authoritative made no mention of his second wife, Abigail Pierce, and their one child, the first Seth Howland. As for the dates, I’d noted them wrong when trying to get it straight on paper. In reality it all fits fine. Which allowed me to stop demonstrating, to Deb’s amusement, where Sadie might possibly have inherited her obsessive tendencies.
I still have no idea which one was an indian. If there was a picture, even a tintype, it couldn’t have been too far back. My great-grandmother had a picture displayed in her house, and I believe my mother said she claimed it was her grandmother or great-grandmother. Which would be Philena Haskins or Abigail Pierce, if it’s in the Howland lineage.
Finally, finishing off this post I started yesterday morning, here is my grandmother, daughter of my great-grandmother pictured near the top of the post, at the age of 11, and then 79 years later, this past Sunday, with Sadie looking as she talks with my brother-in-law’s mother, not pictured.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Flowers and Berries
I don’t remember what the flowers in the second picture above are called, but their shade of purplish rose-red is one of my favorite colors. Once upon a time I had double impatiens in approximately the same shade and they were like Best Flowers Ever. My mother has to keep pulling up and tossing away some of the above plants because they spread like weeds. The lillies, in the top picture, are something we had in the yard the whole time I was growing up. Along with some tiger lillies.
Sadie tried a couple of these and seemed to like them. I ate a whole handful, but most of them were pretty sour, even when they appeared quite ripe. I was thinking they were thimbleberries, but apparently those are always red. Turns out they are black raspberries, which I always thought was a silly term people used for blackberries, which are different. At any rate, they were bearing impressively.
Cape Cod Cactus
These are Cape Cod Cactus, with some very enthusiastic vinca growing among them. It’s quite strange, seeing them in my grandmother’s garden in the winter, doing just fine in this climate. As you can see, they’re gorgeous when they bloom, but I’m told each bloom lasts a mere six hours. Thus all the dead flowers visible along with the transient blooming ones.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Valerie Sightings
I need to respond to a server emergency (or not; it appears my instructions to them worked), but here’s a pair of quick Valerie pictures. The first is with her great-grandmother at the 90th birthday party Sunday. The second is her exploring the “cave” under my desk, which is her favorite place to go. It’s as if she’s seeking a den.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Happy 90th Birthday!
To my amazing grandmother, Hazel Irving, who come to think of it is almost exactly twice my age now. We’re having the big party tomorrow, apparently at the parish house of the church (which she has belonged to longer than anyone; they celebrated her 75 years last year or the year before).
Here are some assorted pictures, the first few not previously posted, the others linking ones already online from old posts. Pardon the fuzziness of the first one. I thought a recent closeup would be nice and it was the best I had offhand.
Monday, June 19, 2006
My First Computer
This was my first computer, called a “PC” for Pocket Computer. Click for a larger, clearer picture.
This was a Christmas present from my father and stepmother in I believe 1983. 1982 Was the big winter overcoat I still have, that needs to be retired, but has served well as coat, blanket and pillow over the years. But I digress.
As far as I know, this should still run, except for needing batteries. It takes a pair of lithiums, which I never got around to replacing when they died after several years.
It has 1k of bubble memory. They were also available with 2k. You could use it as a basic calculator, and for things like storing addresses. You could also program in a modified version of BASIC. For instance, instead of the entire word INPUT for that command, it was shortened to the letter I.
The most significant thing I did with it was program it to return present and future value interest factors based on inputs then applied to the relevant formulas. That was pretty cool.
I’d played with other computers before then, starting with a friend’s TRS80 in… 1977? I believe it was the latter half of 10th grade, but maybe it was later. He had gotten his parents to co-sign a loan for $1000 to buy the thing, at any rate. That was probably where I learned the first elements of BASIC, at Bill Knight’s house on the computer.
I got my first computer larger than the pocket one in 1985, as a hand-me-down TRS80 Color Computer 2. When it died, instead of realizing the way the world was heading, I dead-ended myself into a Color Computer 3 and encountered my first software/hardware incompatibility. With the 2 I was using a superlative word processing software that would not run on the 3, so I had to spend a bunch of money on more software, and I spent too much on a mouse and on a 5 1/4” external floppy drive back when single and double sided and density were distinctions that mattered. The OS for the 3 was called OS/9 and was written by some company called Microsoft.
My first IBM compatible, which for an old-timer is not a strange term to use thankyouverymuch, I bought in early 1988 for way too much money. It was a Packard-Bell 286. I think it was 12 MHz. It had a huge 60 MB hard drive when 20 MB was pretty standard; I at least knew that much. It ran DOS 3.3, so no DOS Edit, just Edlin or Copy Con. What I didn’t know was it was nuts to buy an EGA monitor and a machine that required same, as VGA already existed and was the future. Oh well.
After all that has transpired, I still think of that old pocket computer as one of the coolest things ever.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Sadie Lately
These are pictures of Sadie downloaded off the camera on the 6th and (twice) on the 7th.
The first four are at my brother’s new place - a house he’s renting on a farm for the same as his apartment had cost - for my niece’s birthday party Sunday. I gave her a little ride around on the bike after she showed so much interest, but she had enough quickly. She loves Sadie-sized furniture. We need to get her a little table and chair set like the ones we saw in Wal-Mart the other day, to give her something abusable she can color at.
The next one is Sadie hugging one of her frogs, which the other day she declared “baby!” It’s actually a frog backpack I bought from a door to door salesperson (allegedly fundraising for charity) at the office years ago. It had been living perched on the patch panel high on the wall in a recessed corner until recently.
The next one is her hugging her grandfather when we were at his house in Plympton to visit and pick up their excellent old dining room table, which looks like it was made to go in our kitchen and couldn’t be more perfect. No more folding camp table.
The one after that is in my father’s yard, near the driveway, where Sadie discovered that a drain grate is Best Thing Ever. She set out to drop as many pebbles and twigs as possible down there, one at a time.
Finally, Sadie in a hat she likes to put on, looking sad for some forgotten reason. Perhaps it was one of her several falls per day. Perhaps she had walked off the end of the coffee table into midair like some obsessive coyote. No idea.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
You Know You Have Little Kids When…
Here’s the other “you know you have kids when...” picture I mentioned, featuring Bob the Duck (aka the House Duck) on his “perch” of educational Baby Einstein water cup thingies, which are pretty clever actually. To the right is a big cup from the hospital, which we use for rinsing Sadie’s hair, filled with her fish set. There’s a fishing pole, squirty fish, sieve fish, sucker fish (so now she knows all about suction cups), goldfish, turtle and frog. Each of them can be hooked up by the fishing pole, or hooked to each other. Hooking them to each other drives Sadie crazy.
This One’s For Ith
I took this as one of a pair of “you know you have little kids when...” pictures. However, it’s also amusing because on the House MD mailing list, they refer to the doctors who work for House as “the ducklings.” And so these three got their names, from left to right: Cameron, Foreman, and Chase. Of course, the senior duck, better quality and traditional yellow, was long since dubbed Bob the Duck, but this would make him the Greg House of the bunch.
These three have squeak holes on the bottom, so they don’t float properly the way Bob does. You can actually force them to fill to varying degrees with water, then squirt it out. Sometimes I fill a couple of them to where they float with relative stability with only the beak and top of head above water, then play Monitor and Merrimac.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Paging Billy Idol
What color are these eyes turning? It’s our favorite guessing game these days. Click each one for larger verions (full size, more than the normal 800 pixels wide). Sadie was clearcut blue almost from the start. Valerie had the indeterminate newborn blue, but it started changing promptly, looking at times like it’d be brown, or golden tan brown, or green, or maybe blue after all, if a steel gray variant, or hazel…
I have to get to work as I am already late, so more pictures will have to wait for tonight or tomorrow morning. Note that the above are all very recent pictures, like past week or less. They are a large sample size, not to show a sequence over time.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Not Baby Pictures
These are a couple of pictures of pictures of my late grandfather, my mother’s father, who would be turning 100 in August if he were still around. He died ten years ago. The pictures give some idea why I always regretted not having had kids while he was still around. I think pictures of him not holding a baby or little kid are rarities.
Speaking of grandparents, my late grandmother, my father’s mother, would have been 95 today if she’d hung around past her all too early expiration date, which was thirty years ago. She’s the short-lived anomaly among my grandparents, though I think middling among her own family.
Anyway, here they are, one size only…
Friday, March 17, 2006
Bonding. Sisters Bonding.
Friday, March 10, 2006
Sadie and Her Grandfather
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Sleepy Girls
Sunday, February 26, 2006
The Girls
Friday, February 10, 2006
We’ll Take What’s Behind Curtain Number Three
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Sunrise
Sunrise one recent morning from my office, the living room, and the bathroom. When I saw the red sky from the office I was inspired to try getting a picture, which worked great once I turned off the flash. When I was a kid I learned “red sky in the morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors delight.” Sure enough, it rained in the afternoon. Unfortunately the red isn’t as evident in the pictures as it was in person, especially initially and from the office, over the yellow building.
