Nickel Ice Cream

I’ve written before about how careful my parents were with money in general and their grocery dollars in particular. Fortunately for my siblings and me, there was usually a little bit of money left over for the occasional treat.

Our town was small and, in an era when most families had only one car, walking was an essential form of transportation. The summer I was 12, I was enrolled in a music program that met at a local school one afternoon each week. And though the school was only a mile or so from our house, it seemed like a much longer trek, especially on a scorching hot summer day. Once the lesson was done, I usually took a slightly longer route home so I could stop by Dad’s work hoping he would give me a nickel to buy an ice cream cone at the drive-in up the street.

There was, of course, no guarantee that Dad would have money for me but when he did, I truly enjoyed the treat. I’m sure I probably made the people at the ice cream place crazy as I wavered between chocolate or strawberry ice cream, but I’m also confident they usually added a little bit more than my nickel’s worth to each cone. Even now, nearly 50 years later, I treasure my memories of those long ago ice cream cones.

Posted for Sian’s Storytelling Sunday. Click here for Sian’s own story and for links to other interesting and entertaining reads. And, of course, you are welcome to add your own story to the link party.

P.S. to my blogging friends: I’ve been away from my blog for more than two months now. I’m embarrassed to admit I have no other excuse than lack of motivation, procrastination, and a variety of lackluster excuses. And, like most other things in life, the longer I waited to address the issue, the more difficult it became. Finally, however, I think I’m ready to call an end to my unplanned hiatus, and I’m looking forward to catching up with your blogs as well as posting more regularly on my own.

Pretty in pink

The Texture Tuesday prompt this week involved the color pink. After looking around the house for subject matter, I concluded that I’m not as much of a pink person as I thought. Fortunately for me, Mother Nature is a huge fan of pink so it didn’t take long to find a perfectly pink flower to use for this challenge.

However, I must have been a bit bothered by my un-pink-ness because I spent my lunch time today searching for tidbits of information about the social and psychological aspects of the color. Here’s some of what I discovered:

• Pink is often associated with love and passion because it stimulates energy and can increase blood pressure, respiration, heartbeat, and pulse rate.
• It has been used in prison cells to reduce erratic behavior and in opposing team locker rooms to increase passivity and reduce aggression.

Note: do these first two seem contradictory to you? arousal vs. passivity? what do I know?

• Pink makes us crave sugar. (I really don’t need encouragement for that!)
• Companies and brands associated with pink: Victoria’s Secret, Mary Kay, T-Mobile, and Pepto-Bismol, among others.
• Contradictory phrases: “tickled pink” = to be happy; “pink slip” = laid off from work.
• First Lady Mamie Eisenhower loved the color so much that it became known as “Mamie pink.”
• After trying to tell the difference between boy and girl twins, the Little Women character Laurie (eventually Jo’s husband) suggested using a blue ribbon for the boy and a pink one for the girl.
• Pinking shears may have derived their name from the scalloped edges of pink flowers such as carnations.

This is, admittedly, not the most strenuous investigation I’ve ever conducted, but it was fun to see how this color might influence us even when we don’t realize it.

Image: Nikon 85mm lens; 1/400 sec @ f/4.5; ISO 400
Post processing: Kim Klassen’s Be Still texture with a layer mask set to multiply at 50% opacity and a second layer of the Be Still texture set to multiply at 20% with the center removed to enhance its framing characteristics.
Fonts: Beautiful Caps ES, Beautiful ES, and Times New Roman

Celebrating Color

“beyonders”—a term applied to participants in Kim Klassen’s year-long Beyond Layers class—celebrated color all last week. We were challenged to share green images, and then, in turn, yellow, pink, blue, and red. The color party culminated on Saturday when rainbbow colors were on the agenda. A post-a-day is a bit ambitious for this working girl, so I combined my images into a GingerPixels template that was shared earlier in the class.

Most of these images come from my 2011 archives and, I must say, going back through my files to find these photos was so much fun! Most of them come from close-to-home locations but I also came across photos from our New Orleans and Key West trips.

Clockwise from upper left:

• The robin’s egg blue paint on this old pickup probably isn’t original, but I thought it was gorgeous!
• I have no idea what this red, frondy flower is, but close inspection shows a coiled up frond just waiting to make its grand entrance.
• The parrot is one of the more colorful creatures at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo and is my contribution to the rainbow challenge.
• I’m in love with the shy-seeming aspect of this sunflower, found at a local pumpkin festival last fall.
• This coral beauty was found at a botanical garden in New Orleans.

The fine art of doing nothing

If you are anything like me, you are the go from the moment your feet hit the floor in the morning until probably well after you should be asleep at night. It does seem sometimes that we, as a society, have forgotten how to relax. The tools (and toys) we have at our disposal do make our lives easier and more enjoyable, but I think they also take a toll on us because it is increasingly difficult to just “turn off” in order to enjoy some of the simpler, non-technology aspects of life.

That’s what this image, selected for the b&w challenge at Kim Klassen’s Texture Tuesday/Beyond Layers, brought to mind. You can’t tell, of course, that this photo was taken at the peak of a Florida summer when the heat and humidity combine in a wicked mix to make even a few outdoor minutes seem like an hour in an overheated sauna. In spite of that reality, I find this scene extremely inviting, and I am disappointed that I didn’t take time to stop, sit, and enjoy a moment of doing absolutely nothing except enjoying the world around me.

The full quote is “How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward. ~Spanish proverb

Image: Nikon 50 mm; 1/200 sec @ f/8.0; ISO 200
Post processing: two layers of Kim Klassen’s Friday texture. The lower one is set to overlay at 40% and the upper one is set to soft light at 100%. Both are masked so the texture is only on the chairs. I also used a levels adjustment to perk up the contrast a bit.
Fonts: Beautiful Caps ES and Beautiful ES

Rainy Day Friday

That’s what my workday today felt like, even though a quick look out the window revealed a bright blue sky filled with fluffy white clouds. Even better, I’m not complaining! It turned out to be an all-to-rare kind of day when I was, for once, able to concentrate on two or three projects (of my choosing) and actually see them through to completion. So, similar to a bad weather day when I might have been stuck at home with a just-right combination of mindset and tasks, I was able to accomplish some of the nuts-and-bolts kind of work that actually makes my and my colleagues’ worklife just a little bit easier.

Driving home from work, I was basking in this sense of accomplishment and simultaneously wondering why it felt so unusual, so SPECIAL. It finally occurred to me that, from a workplace perspective, my colleagues and I have been involved in continuous change for more than two years. We moved (ick!), our parent company was acquired by another firm (with all the turmoil those kind of changes usually entail), and our own company underwent a significant reorganization. Add to that a complete infrastructure update (everything from telephones to computers and the attendant management) over the last six to eight months—it’s been quite a ride!

So, it’s early Friday evening and I still have the weekend ahead of me. Monday will be here before I want it to be but, in the meantime, I plan to enjoy the weekend. The highlight is likely tomorrow’s early morning trip to a nearby nature preserve with several other women from the Digital Divas, a photo-centric Meetup group. I’m looking forward to the fellowship of like-minded individuals, nature’s embrace, and, with any luck, a few good photos as well!

One more day

I enjoy the color and fragrance a bouquet of flowers lends to the house, but I don’t buy them as often as I would like. The problem is that our cats, Slider and Peaches, think flowers are about the tastiest treat there is. So I buy them on the weekend when I’m home long enough to see and enjoy them, but at night and during the workweek the flowers adorn our usually empty guest room. That’s exactly what happened with the inexpensive mixed flower arrangement I brought home last weekend, except that I completely forgot about the flowers once I put them in the guest room late last Sunday. I was happily surprised when I found that the flowers survived the entire week, especially the ones that transformed themselves from last weekend’s buds to the gorgeous blooms in this photo. In fact, I decided they were a perfect subject for this week’s Beyond Layers challenge around the prompt “whisper.”

Image: Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 lens; 1/80 sec @ f/4.5; ISO 400
Post processing:Kim Klassen’s Flourish texture with a layer mask set to screen at 25% opacity and several adjustment layers
Fonts: SNF Daphne and Dali

Always learning

I’ll admit to being a teacher’s nightmare. It’s not that I was a discipline problem (I was so scared of my own shadow that causing trouble was the last thing I was apt to do) or even that I intended to be difficult, but I truly did not have a clue about the positive effects studying would have on my class performance or test results. From elementary through high school, I managed a pretty solid “C” average based solely on what I retained from classroom sessions, Cliff’s Notes, and occasional pre-test cramming.

I enlisted in the U.S. Navy shortly after I graduated from high school in 1969 and, via a combination of entrance assessments and my bootcamp “dream sheet,” ended up qualifying for Photographer’s Mate “A” school (an intensive 10-week course that covered the basics of several still cameras, black & white film and paper processing, motion picture photography, and aerial film processing). My study skills had not improved in the few months since high school, and I still consider it a minor miracle that I graduated from that course. Time passed, I earned a promotion or two and, in due time, was transferred from my initial duty station to a new command where I was nominated, and subsequently selected, to attend an elite summer-long photographic quality control control (QC) course at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Talk about being out of my element…slide rules, logarithms, formulas, chemistry, film sensitivity, sensitometry, densitometry…oh, my! I don’t remember much about that course except the mentoring I was fortunate enough to receive from our class study group. Without their help, I would never have survived that QC course but, more importantly, their influence and encouragement became the foundation for my subsequent educational endeavors.

Forty-plus years later, I definitely get the connection between studying and practicing and results, and I now appreciate the effort teachers put into preparation and presentation. Thus, I acknowledge Kim Klassen’s hard work in developing and presenting the year-long Beyond Layers e-course. The first couple of months have been amazing and I am definitely looking forward to the rest of the year.

Still, there’s a bit of a disconnect between what I see and hear and my ability to apply those lessons to my own images. The photo that accompanies this post is a case in point. As much as possible, I tried to duplicate Kim’s setting and subject matter (imitation is the best form of flattery, isn’t it?), but the end result isn’t quite what I was hoping for. It’s too busy, too contrasty, too (fill in the blank)…just too much. But even though the image and the post-processing isn’t quite what I imagined, I thoroughly enjoyed the process. What fun it was to see the effect of actions, layer masks, and adjustment layers on a single image!

Image: Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 lens; 1/125 sec @ f/4.5; ISO 200
Post processing: Pioneer Woman Soft & Faded action, Kim Klassen’s Happy Heart texture, and Hue/Saturation and Gradient Map adjustment layers