A green-thumb I am not.

We have been working on our garden. Or making the attempt.

About four ...maybe six weeks ago Ryan and I planted some herb seeds: basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and marjoram—some of the herbs I cook with the most. They have sprouted and are growing happily on my plant shelves. Yay!

They all sprouted within about ten days. :-)

I also have some cherry tomatoes that I started from seed a couple of months back. And two weeks ago we went to Split Mountain Nursery and bought a whole bunch of tomato plants, pepper plants, a zucchini plant (just one) and some cucumber plants. Yum!

But it was probably not a good idea to buy the plants when we did because the garden still isn't ready for them.

You may not remember that when we first bought our house it had a brick patio on the west side of the shed. I remember it well, because we have removed and rearranged those bricks... a couple of times since we've lived here.

This photo is from 2018, the very first time
we took the bricks out.

That's Bruce, planting our very first garden here in 2018. We laid the bricks down around the garden (everywhere you see bare dirt in the picture, plus a path down the center). I don't remember why we moved the bricks again, but we had to for some reason. And now we are doing it again. But I do know why this time.

The kids and I spent one grueling hour in the heat
of the day moving about half of those bricks. (Which pile did I stack, and which one did the kids stack?)
Then Bruce helped me move the rest of them
early last Saturday morning.

This year I want to build grow-boxes instead of just having regular garden beds. This is because our garden washes into and over the bricks every year. That's one reason that we moved those bricks again.

The garden fabric we had underneath the bricks was no longer preventing weeds and grass from growing up through the brick. (We just reused the old fabric that was under the brick patio to begin with.) That's another, even better, reason for moving them again.

And because we tore out a whole bunch of bushes that first year, and then didn't really level the ground very well, all of the brick paths were pretty uneven.  And with the plants and the dirt trying to take over the brick, sometimes those uneven spots were not very visible. It was kind of a tripping hazard. So that's the third reason for moving them. Again.

Right now our garden looks like this:

It looks like a pretty shady deal, but this photo
was just taken first thing this morning. It actually
gets more sun, for most of the day, than
any other spot in our tree-lined yard.

Well, after we moved all the brick, Bruce and I came into the house and planned out where we want the boxes to be, and figured out what we'd need for supplies. The main garden will be U-shaped. We'll have a smaller box right next to the shed, and put some kind of trellis stuff on the shed walls so we can grow viney veggies (like cucumbers, pole beans, etc.) on the shed—or maybe we'll just put carrots and radishes in there. We'll put brick along the back wall, bordering the garden, but we're thinking of leaving a few open spaces to see if we can grow grapes along the wall. We'll see. And then, of course, we'll put bricks all around and in-between the other sides of the boxes.

Well, when we had that all figured out, we went and spent a fortune at Lowe's getting the wood for the boxes. We are hoping to can hundreds of tomatoes this year—and for the next ten years—to get back our investment. ;-)

Seriously!
What's the deal with the crazy price of lumber?

We had an adventure at Lowe's, too. The nice, young man (Jason North) who was helping us load fourteen-foot boards into our twelve-foot van accidentally bumped a board into our windshield. 

looking out through a cracked windshield
Uh-oh!

But, since Jason was on the clock, Lowe's will pay to replace the windshield. Now I won't have to clean all the bugs off of it. ;-)

And here we are: The bricks are moved and the garden is tilled, but we still need to finish leveling the paths for the bricks. We also need to find where we can tap into the sprinkling system to get water to the shed-wall garden, and the dreamed-of grapes. Then we can build everything.

In the meantime, our "garden" is in the kitchen, sitting on (and around) the plant shelf I built last summer.

Our new plants overflowed the shelf, and
all the big pots I'd bought had to be
displaced. But it's temporary...just until
the garden is ready for them.

There's just one more planty adventure to relate:

A week or so after Memorial Day, Bruce and I were at the grocery store and I saw a basket full of very dry rosemary plants on clearance. They had tags on them that said they were great for grilling, so they were obviously meant to be consumed and were not well cared for. We bought one and brought it home, thinking to transplant and water the poor thing. If it didn't survive, I figured we could at least take the dry leaves and put them into a spice jar to cook with, and that didn't sound so bad.

And then I went through a period of complete and utter non-motivation; it was all I could do some days just to complete one task—which was usually making dinner. So the rosemary sat in front of the plant shelf, and it got watered every now and then.

This morning I looked at that poor, sad rosemary plant and decided I'd better do something about it, since now at least two-thirds of the leaves were completely dry. So I prepared a bigger pot for it, and then tried to remove it from its current pot. It wouldn't budge. And the dry leaves were falling everywhere and getting mixed with dirt. 

So I took it outside where I could be really serious about it, and not as worried about getting dirt everywhere. There I discovered that it had lots of roots growing out of the holes in the bottom of the pot, and the only way to loosen it from the pot was to scrape or cut them off. So I did. 

And it still was not going to leave that darn little seven-inch pot.

I grabbed a knife and cut the pot off of the plant. It was so rootbound that I couldn't begin to loosen its roots, and I wondered if they'd be able to spread out in the new pot. So then I started to perform surgery on it. (I'm sure it thought I was committing herbicide!) I stuck a fork right into the middle of that tangle of root-ball, and started twisting, hearing the roots snap with every turn. And then I had the bright idea to put the sprayer on the hose and shoot water at the roots. That did loosen and remove some dirt, but I really think there were more tangled roots than there was dirt. At least the roots became a little more pliable.

Finally I decided to stop torturing the poor plant and bring it into the house, pot it, water it, and place it on the plant shelf. And here it is:

After a stressful...probably several months...and a tortuous morning, will this plant survive?

Pray for Rosemary.

And my garden.

Playing in the waterfall at Capitol Reef...
1979?

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, A time of confidences.
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories; They're all that's left you.

                                 ~Paul Simon (Bookends)

I have taken it upon myself to scan (and repair) and save all of my mom's photos. It's been a fun and interesting project so far...although very time-consuming. It's also made me think a lot about family pictures—what to do and what not to do. I am not a great photographer by any means, but I think I've been learning a lot about what makes a good picture.

Now, my mom is an artist, and she was always looking for beautiful things to paint, so when we went on vacations she took a lot of landscape pictures. And some of them are pretty cool. 

This is a really impressive picture of Bryce Canyon—especially when you compare it to a lot of the scenery pics we have from our vacations. But you can find twenty more just like it online. Now, in all fairness, when the photo was taken you could not find twenty more of these online—you would have only seen it
in a brochure from Bryce Canyon.

This is also from the Bryce Canyon vacation. I know, without a doubt, that Mom thought this was just so cute that she had to take a picture of it. But I don't even know exactly where this is. Is it the Bryce Canyon visitor center? No idea.

OK. These photos are swell, but they hold little meaning to me now; they are just nice scenery. Again, to be fair, some of the rest of us may have taken these pics, not just Mom. But she didn't even end up painting them. 

So here's Pro-Tip Number One:  Take all the scenery pictures you want; really, do. But make sure there are some people that you love in them, too! I can promise you that forty years down the road your family will care more for the picture that you are in than the awesome scenery.

Like this one:

This is some epic, beautiful scenery.
Better yet, that's my mom!
(at Capitol Reef National Park)

In 1978 our family took an amazing vacation to California. We went to see my brother, Peter, who'd been living there (and is probably the reason my parents decided to take a California vacation). We also went to the San Diego Zoo and, if I remember right, the Wildlife Safari (is that part of the Zoo?). And we went to Disneyland, and Sea World, and a beach somewhere. It was an epic vacation!

Just to really pound that first point in, here are some pictures we took at Disneyland:

I could tell you the reason each of these pictures
was taken—the WOW factor being most of it.

The next three pictures are also from Disneyland.

Here's the Disneyland Castle.
And on the left are Paul, Denise, Melanie, and me
(I'm kind of hidden behind Melanie).
Dad is in the foreground. 

There's Melanie in the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse. Paul's also in the picture, but he's up higher and hidden by the tree branches.

And, believe it or not, this is also at Disneyland.

Tip Number Two:  When you take a picture, think about the framing a little.

If you look back up at the Disneyland Castle picture, our family is kind of a small part of it. And that's kind of OK, because you want the context of seeing the castle. But you also have to consider that when I cleaned this picture up on the computer, I cropped it a lot. Before I cropped it you could see more of the castle, but you could hardly see us at all.

Consider this picture:

This photo was taken at Capitol Reef. In the very center you can almost see Denise, me, and Melanie hiking along. Now there really is something to be said about the scale of everything here. The scenery in Southern Utah is HUGE! But what if Mom—or Dad—had zoomed in a little to cut off some of the foreground? Then you'd see this:

We girls are a tiny bit more visible. What if the zoom had also cut off some of the sides...and a little more foreground?

Now we are even a little more visible, and you still get the scale of us compared to those cliffs. As it is, the best I can do is enlarge and crop on the computer, which messes with the focus. If you can do the work with your camera when you're taking the picture, you should try to.

Tip Number Three:  Label your pictures in some way. I admit I am not great at this, but I am learning.

For the Disney photos I was lucky that they were still in their original package, and that the package looked like this:

There's a lot of interesting things to notice on this package. 1. The film was developed at ZCMI. Does that store even exist any more?
2. We sent it to be developed on August 14 of 1978, and Disneyland was July 24, 1978, only two weeks earlier. We must have been pretty excited to see our pictures!
3. It cost $2.97 for twenty prints—that's about fifteen cents per print. :-) 

But the best thing is that name and date. Hooray!

Most of the pictures I'm working on are not labeled, and so I have had to become Super Sleuth to figure out when they might have been taken. Let me show you.

Clue number 1: Awww, so cute!
This is Melanie, Denise, and me, at my brother's wedding. (I am on the right.)

I happen to know that I was eight years old when Gregory got married. That's one point. Look at the picture; Melanie and I have the same dresses—that's another point. And then, the length of my hair...

Clue number 2: This is me, the following school year. 

Here you can see that I am wearing the dress from the wedding—which is why I'm pretty sure it's the year after the wedding, making it the 1975-76 school year. But look at my hair! I got it cut!

Here I am (with some extended family) on July 4, 1976; I know it's 1976 because Peter was dressed as a revolutionary man in the 4th of July parade in Kearns (for the Bicentennial). You can see that my hair is still very short.

Hm. Or maybe this is before that school picture, which would make that school photo from the 1976-77 school year. This is a dilemma...

Well, anyway, here's another picture:

Here is what, I'm guessing from the last few pics, is me at my tenth birthday party, which would make this 1977. My hair is a little longer, but not much. It's possible this is my eleventh birthday (1978), but another deciding factor is my little niece, Jenne. She looks like she's around two years old in this picture, which makes 1977 more likely.

We know the Disney pics are 1978. After Disneyland, I have to start surmising and sleuthing again.

So put dates and names on your pictures! You can find pencils that are supposed to be safe for printed photos. Or you could write it in your photo album. Or you could stick them in a labeled envelope. Or some cameras will just stick the date on the photo for you (although I'm not a big fan of that). Just find a way to do it. 

Tip Number 4:  If you have packages of old photos—the ones you had to take to the store and wait two weeks for them to be developed—put the negatives in negative holders now! These sleeves will keep them dust-free—which will be fabulous when you decide to scan and digitize your photos. And they will keep them safer than the paper packets the negatives come in. I've run across several that, over the years, have become very attached to their paper envelopes (probably the adhesive used to make the envelopes). And when the bottom edge of the negative is glued to the bottom edge of the packet, and you're not supposed to get your fingerprints on the negative, how can you remove it from said packet? It's hard to do!

This is one of the negative strips I scanned yesterday. It's taken a lot of time to remove the dust from it (using computer software). In the end it's worth it.

Of course there's always an exception. For one thing, maybe your negatives are already forty years old, and dusty. But also, I haven't been able to find negative sleeves for any other film size than 35mm. So they won't work with 126, 127, or 110 film sizes.

Tip Number 5: Take pictures of life! School pictures are nice as a marker of your child's age, and pictures of events—like weddings and vacations—are awesome. But candid photos show your family life and personality, and bring back memories so much better. For example:

Easter egg hunt at Grandpa's house.
Why am I unhappy?
It was Easter.
It was also my birthday.
And Bruce had left that very morning
for a month-long, out-of-state job.

Here are some happier examples:

Rachel, posed for the camera

Rachel, living life (with Tucker)

Jessica, five years old

Also Jessica, at five years old.

Brandon, posed for the camera

Also Brandon, posed for the camera.
But this time it was his idea.

So, yeah. Take pictures of life. The caveat: Don't take so many that you spend more time behind the camera than you do with your family.

Tip Number 6:  Print and display some of your pictures!

These days everyone has a camera. If you have a phone, you have a camera. And you can scroll through those photos every single day. 

But your family can't. Or, even if you let them take your phone and look at photos any time they want to, there is a...something about holding the photo (or photo book) in your hands. Something about seeing several pictures in context, all on the same page. Something about seeing your favorites displayed in your house. Truly! 

I love these people!

Those Disney pics from when I was a kid? I have never seen any of them since they were first printed. Not one. So it's been really, really fun to scan them and clean them up and have those memories flood back in. The same with all of the pictures I've been working on lately. But I would have loved to be able to look at them over and over again when I was a kid. It's worth fifty cents a print to have them in your house.

So, those are my words of wisdom for today. I guess if I had anything else to add it would probably be this:

Get your old photos and negatives scanned onto a computer! And enjoy them to pieces!

Afterbath

 People are always saying what a pretty cat we have.

And it's true...Luna is a very pretty cat.

But she sheds. I mean, all those furry pets shed, and Luna always has, but this year she is really shedding.
A lot.
I mean, you know Pig-Pen in the Peanuts cartoons? If you touch Luna these days, a cloud of hair puffs off of her just like the cloud of dirt around Pig-Pen. No lie.

And she makes my house look filthy! Because, all those pretty colors she has? Well. If she sits on the light colored furniture, you can see all her black hair; and if she sits on the dark colored furniture you see the light colored hair—enough to make another ten cats a day, I think. It is a lose/lose situation. For me. 

I've started threatening to go get her shaved. It was a temptation, but I don't want to pay for a groomer. Or have an ugly, hairless cat.

Instead, I googled: Why does my cat shed so much? And: How can I keep my cat from shedding so much?

The answers were: 

1. Get a non-grain, high-protein cat food.
Well, I'm willing to do that, but Luna is a weird cat. She eats one kind of cat food, thank you very much. And if you get that brand of cat food in a different flavor, she won't eat it. She will eat Cheetos, and Doritos, and ice cream, but don't get her the wrong kind of cat food!

Well, I am also stubborn and determined. So I went to the pet store and talked to the nice people there, and came home with a non-grain, fish-flavored cat food...which I had my doubts about because, despite what all the cat food commercials say about cats and fish, Luna hates tuna. But the helpful people there said that fish oils and fishy foods help keep cats' skin and hair healthy, and keep down the shedding. And it's salmon-flavored, not tuna...

She hates it.

2. Brush the cat daily.
Yeah. She doesn't like that either. But I went ahead and bought a special cat brush. It looks like a saw blade that's been bent into a hoop. This thing she loved! She let me brush her for a good fifteen minutes, and then she turned around so I could do her other side. Yay!

That pile of hair behind my elbow came off in about 30 minutes.
It doesn't look so nice when it's not on the cat; it looks like a big, nasty, giant, dust-bunny. I mean, really the size of a bunny.

3. Give the cat a bath—at least monthly.

I have avoided bathing Luna because, unlike every other cat I've ever had, I felt guilty getting her declawed. (About the time we got Luna I learned that they remove the ends of the cat's toes, and not just their claws. 😔 I just couldn't do it.) Luna doesn't think twice about biting you if you pet her more than seven times; I didn't want to try her out—or get a sampling of those claws—in the bathtub.
But I went ahead and got some cat shampoo, too. (Which is vanilla scented. A vanilla scented cat?)

When I got back from the pet store, Luna was napping, so I started brushing her. Like I said, she loved that.
Then we tried the new cat food. That was a no.
Then I had lunch and took a little nap—because I wanted some distance between the brushing and the bath; I don't want her to associate them together.

I filled the bathtub about four-inches deep with nice, warm water, and put a towel into the bottom of it so she'd have something to grab onto when she got nervous. (Kaylie read that on the internet. It didn't do any good.) I put a couple of old towels nearby to dry her off when the evil deed was done. Then I found my napping cat, carried her into the bathroom, shut the door, and made the fifteen-foot walk to the bath tub. And now she started getting suspicious and a little nervous.

Into the tub she went.

And yes, I am heartless enough to have Kaylie take pictures while I put Luna through the worst ordeal of her kitty life.

What a good girl! She didn't scratch or bite! I was so impressed! And I told her so. I told her what a very good cat she was as I poured cup after cup of water over her. I told her how good she was as I squeezed vanilla shampoo on her. I told her how good she was being as I washed and rinsed her—all the while holding her down by the scruff of her neck as best I could. She did try her best to escape, but she didn't even start meowing at me until we were halfway done.

She didn't care about the towel.
She scrabbled around trying to escape, regardless.

She didn't appreciate my kind words any more than the bath. She made a beeline for the door as soon as she could get away from me.

Well, I dried her off as much as I could before carrying her out, wrapped in a dry (temporarily dry) towel. I kept telling her what a good cat she was. And then I let her go.

The look on her face says it all.

And, like any self-respecting cat who's just had a bath, she immediately proceeded to wash herself, thank you very much!

The next thing she wanted was to go outside. But this weird cat of ours likes to roll in the dirt, and she still wasn't completely dry—I did not want her to go outside. 

In the sunlight from the front door I could see more hair falling off of her. After the brushing, and the globs of hair in the bathtub, how did she even have any left to shed?
Well, she was dry enough for another brushing. So we sat in the sun by the front door and I brushed her for another ten minutes. 

That is the cool cat brush. And the baby-bunny-sized pile of hair from after her bath.

Well, pretty soon Luna ran off. And then guess what I saw...
Our side door, which doesn't like to shut tight, was open just enough for her to go outside. 😒

Ah, well.

Look closely.
She is sitting on the outside of the window.

And here is the afterbath...aftermath of the whole tale: 

Luna is in the house, shedding on the back of the couch.
She has already forgiven me.
The daily brushing will have to be a thing.
And she's in for a monthly bath, too.
But I'll trade the cat food for a flavor she will eat.

No More Notifications

 Hi, All!

I mean All Of My Faithful Followers Who Actually Signed Up To Get Email Notifications Of New Blog Posts On Loralee's Fancy.

Blogger says they won't be doing that any more, beginning in June—notifying you, I mean.

That means when I press the "Publish" button, my blog won't automatically email you to say that I've written something. I imagine they have some other plan in place, or I have to make my own plan, but for now I don't know what that looks like.

So, I'm very sorry for the three of you who've been getting email notices and won't be any more. I know it will be dreadful to miss any of the amazing things I have to say.

But maybe the next time I write (which could be weeks, months, or years the way I've been going) I will have figured it all out.

'Til then...

Editing

 Well, I've been home for a couple of weeks now. (sigh of relief)

I have been looking through the boxes and boxes of photos and papers that I brought home from my mom's house. Some days it is just overwhelming—everything is overwhelming on those days. And some days it's fun. 

Every single box you see in my living room has photos or papers that I brought from my mom's house to be scanned. And there's lots more, still waiting.
It's kind of exciting, actually. On a fun day.

Today is one of the fun days, so I thought I'd show you what I'm doing to edit photos.

First of all, I bought a dedicated photo scanner; it will scan photos, negatives, and slides. (It scans documents too, but I bought it specifically for photos and negatives.) The cool thing about it is that it will scan in up to 9600 dpi. For those of you who might not know, dpi is dots per inch. 

So, here's some technical stuff:

Your printer doesn't see pictures as pictures, but as dots or pixels. If you have 1 dpi, then each pixel will fill up one square inch; 20 dpi would be 20 pixels per square inch. Ideally, for printing pictures, you want at least 300 dpi. But if you scan a one-inch negative at 300 dpi, then you can only print a one-inch picture and still have it look good. If you even double its size, it will look blurry and pixelated. Like this:

Well... this is an exaggerated example I got on the internet (I don't own the Mona Lisa). Your pictures wouldn't look this bad on the computer monitor, but they would make some pretty terrible prints (although, as I said, not as bad as this sample).

Now, if I scan the photo (negative) at 2400 dpi, then when I edit it I can reduce the dpi to 300 (printing size) in my editing software. But here is the cool part: When I reduce the dpi by eight times, the one-inch negative increases by eight times. 

You can see in the top picture that this negative strip is 6.407 inches wide (outlined in pink), and was scanned at 2400 pixels per inch (dpi—in green).
In the bottom picture I changed the dpi to 300, but the width of negative strip jumped to 51.253 inches!
I can easily reduce this to a good, printable size
when I'm finished with it.

So now I can print my finished picture at the correct dpi (300), and enlarge it to a good print size. Cool, huh?

OK. The first thing I did was choose a negative to scan. I had to do some tricky stuff with my scanner because it was an unusual negative size (I won't go into detail here. You're welcome.) But what it meant is that instead of the scanner correcting the color on the negative, I had to do it myself. Here's what I scanned:

Yup. It's a strip of negatives.

The first thing I do is to invert the color:

Still not great, but better...believe it or not.

Then the beginnings of some color correction:

This is looking much better!

Since I only want to work on one picture at a time, and because the computer is really slow when it works on images this big, I'm going to copy just one of these pics to another window so I can work on it. I chose the middle picture:

So here the color looks better, but it's kind of dull. Also, all the whitish specks and lines are dust that need to be cleaned up. I did get an anti-static cloth and clean the negative (which is a little scary after a whole lifetime of being told, "Don't touch the negatives!"). This is probably the fourth time I scanned and then dusted this particular negative trying to get it "perfect". When do you say, "That's enough of that!" ?

Well. This was my stopping point. I'll have to clean the dust with the computer software. But first, a little more color-correction:

That looks pretty nice,
but now the dust really stands out!

Time to get rid of some dust particles. This takes a while, and I'm not going to go into detail—I'll just show you some before and after pics.

I zoomed in on Dad and Huston so you can see it a little better—and, of course, if you click on the pic, it should show even bigger:

before...see the dust?

and after

All of this takes a long time—about five hours for this picture (although get a little faster as I get into the swing of it.) But I won't do this with every photo and slide; there are hundreds of them! And while it can be fun, and it's definitely interesting, I'm still trying to run my household.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing in my spare time. Well, all right; it's actually the housework that takes up my spare time. ;-)

Here's the finished photo. 

Not bad, huh?

This picture was worth the cleanup time for a few reasons. First of all, we have very few pictures of Huston...well, I haven't run across any more yet. I remember at least one time when I went with Dad all the way to Salt Lake City (it seemed like such a long ride back then!) to pick up Huston so he could spend Christmas Day with us. I loved having my dad all to myself for that ride—and I was a little jealous and bored once Huston joined us. Kids!

Second, you can see what our living room used to look like in the early 70s, and I think that's kind of cool. I remember it so well: The dark wooden furniture that was barely cushioned enough to be sittable. The gold, textured carpet with such a low pile that it was really more like a heavy fabric—so prevalent back then. The pinkish chair that, for some reason, makes me think of my Grandma Johnson. The carved, wooden Indian head that, I believe, was from Brasil. The famous picture (famous in our family, at least) of the old, blind beggar that Mom had painted...and had gotten two different offers of $500 for! The wooden statue of a mother and child that Peter had given to Mom. Our old, black & white, Motorola TV. Even the three wrought-iron candle holders with the red, gold, and green glass cups. 

And, third, you can see how cute Wendy, Denise and I were...or at least how little we were. And also, that's my brand new baby doll that I got that morning (I could tell you a story about that doll—and one about the little ironing board too.)

That's probably Uncle Norman, sitting behind me on the pink chair; probably Nolan in the foreground on the right. Good stuff.

Anyway, that's what I'm working on these days. And now it's time to get back to editing pictures instead of just talking about editing them. :-)