Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A tiny jade (I think) turtle that Poss gave to me. It's almost 3/8th inch long.


The picture was taken with the DigiMicro USB digital microscope Karen gave me as part of my Christmas present. Now I can include the tiny turtles! What other tiny things do I need to show?

New Multifunction Printer

The very old HP inkjet printer we had for our color printing was not playing well with all of our new computers. Windows Vista doesn't play well with much of anything older than it is and our MacBook Air computers seemed to get stymied by the little print server doo-dad that put the printer on the network. The little Dell Mini running Linux was completely flummoxed by the print server doo-dad. That left a couple of notebook computers running Windows XP that could use the printer and we don't use those computers any longer!

We needed to get a modern color printer. Off to Costco we went.

We came home with a Canon PIXMA MP980. This is a nifty printer. It connects to our wireless network and all of our computers can use it. (Well, I haven't tried the Linux system yet and, since I now have a Mac, I don't use it much.) It has six ink cartridges (including gray) for our photo-printing pleasure. It copies. It scans. It scans slides! So I got to free up some real estate by replacing the old printer and scanner with one, smaller device. Ain't technology grand?!

Did I say it scans slides? I had to try that feature out. You might have heard that I have thousands of family slides that need scanning. Here are the next 100!

As we saw last time, Jack has gotten shutter happy. We're now getting a lot of pictures of the same event with little or no change in the cast of characters from slide to slide. Mom suggested that I could scan only a small portion of the slides. Up to now there weren't many duplicates. But the problem with deciding which to scan pretty much requires scanning them to see which to scan. So they're still all getting scanned. I suppose I could get a little previewer to weed out the pictures that are blurry or badly composed versions of more successful pictures.

In the middle of these pictures is the first (and only, so far) picture with all five kids.

Jack still hasn't made an appearance with Karen.

Here's Karen!

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First Christmas with all five kids

Merry Christmas (plus 45)!

We're up to the seventh carousel of slides.  This has a few pictures of Christmas, 1963.  All five of us are here (but never all together at the same time in any picture).

Carousels 1 through 6 go from August, 1949, to December, 1963.  That averages two years and four months per carousel of 100 slides.  With this volume Jack has become a picture-taking maniac.  We have only two months of our lives here.

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That was some fur coat our grandmother had.  The last picture in the group has her smiling with teeth showing.  She always seems to have a rather grim expression so that one is a nice surprise.

What happened to cousin Danny's eye?

Here is an article from The New Mexican that tells about the plane ride we took.  The caption for the picture was for another family that also took the ride.  I guess they decided after they laid out the page that ours was a more attactive family so they used our picture.  They just didn't get around to rewriting the caption.
We were the first family to fly and there was some difficulty getting things going.  So they gave us a longer ride than the 20 minutes we were supposed to get to make up for our long wait.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday, Special Christmas Edition

Here are the turtles on our tree! Some have already been featured in this space.


A Jay Strongwater ornament.

A Christopher Radko ornament.

A metal and enamel ornament.

An unsigned gourd. (A gift from Peggy and Michele)

A gourd signed something like "D Meyer 1999" (It's probably Denise Meyers but her web site is broken when I wrote this. The site shows up (without pictures) in Google's cache.)

A gourd by Robert Rivera.

No tree is complete without a herd of turtles!

MLM: All I want for Christmas

Showing old letters to Santa seems to be a common thing to do this time of the year. I hope seeing a few more doesn't cause too much anguish.

When I was planning this post I was thinking that I would be griping about the process of having to write these letters to Santa that never produced the desired results. I thought that it had been a futile effort but it turns out that I actually did get some of the things I asked for. How about that?

Here is my letter from 1958 that I dictated to Mom.
A look back at the pictures of Christmas, 1958, shows that I did get a train! YAY, SANTA! I don't know if I got the stylish brown jeans.


I had to print my letter for 1960 myself.
I got a Dennis the Menace doll sometime but I don't see him in the 1960 pictures. Let's assume that Santa came through for me that year (and years later for Izzy when she sold the box it came in for a tidy sum on eBay).

But I did have a major disappointment that year. I really wanted the Mr. Machine (you'll notice it's first on my list). It was introduced that year so maybe it was the must-have toy of the year and Mom and Dad just couldn't wrest one from another shopper at the local TG&Y. Or maybe they realized that it had an annoying bell that rang constantly. I saw one a few years ago at a local antique store but it was just too late. Watch this commercial for Mr. Machine on YouTube and you'll understand my disappointment.

In 1965 I got more helpful in my letter. I gave Santa the prices (from the Sears catalog) of all the things I wanted. (Why would Santa need to have prices? He has elves making these things!) I checked off the items I got. I scored three times!
I don't remember the Jr. Chef Mixer (for the fantastic price of $6.66!) but it's got a check mark. I was a junior chef! And I got the Mouse Trap game. Did that finally leave the building in the Crapture after only 42 years? I couldn't remember what the Crazy Clock Game was but thank goodness again for YouTube (and TimeWarp Vintage Toys)! That was a silly toy.

Years later I got some toy slot machines from Edmund Scientifics when I could appreciate them more. They were a good introduction to probability.

I hope Santa brings you much of what you want for Christmas this year. Especially world peace.

More Christmas pictures from childhood

Here is the sixth of the carousels of slides.

We have the rest of the pictures of us being photographed actually having fun. I still find that very odd but it's nice to see that we were allowed to be kids once in a while.

Then we have two Christmases with the Ramirezes, 1961 in Los Alamos then 1962 in California. In 1961 the blocks that the fortresses are still being made from arrive. I thought that the ones from 1955 looked chunkier than the ones that survive (but everybody else seemed to be sure that they were the ones so I kept my mouth shut). But 47 years (and counting) is an impressive lifetime for cardboard blocks.

Then the family is complete! Karen makes her appearance!

We even get a few pictures of Dad in this set. Blurry sometimes, but he's there.

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Thaï-ï-ï-ï-ï...

Today we went down to Mira Mesa to see the Metropolitan Opera's broadcast of "Thaïs" in High Definition.  Things were going well.  Athanaël had gotten spiffed up and was ready to try to convert Thaïs.  Just as Thaïs (sung by the latest Lacroix supermodel, Renée Fleming) was about to make her appearance things changed to very low definition.  No sound, very few pixels, no picture, snippets of sound, a few pixels.

Someone came in and hollered that they were going to let it continue like this till the intermission when they'd reestablish their connection with the satellite.  When the intermission was about to end he came back and said that things were hopeless.  We could stay and enjoy the big pixels and no sound or we could get a refund or exchange for the replay on January 7.

We're going to try again on the 7th.  Wish us luck.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Jay Strongwater box.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A nightlight (metal and fused glass).

MLM: Miss Ketola and other terrors in the library

Librarians always seemed to be terrorizing me. Was it just me or did they have issues with all children, those little defilers of their sacred temples? Or did they have special, unwritten rules for the little boys?

At Pueblo Junior High School the librarian was Miss Helen Ketola. She was the epitome of scary librarians. Here is her picture from my 8th grade yearbook (that I had modified slightly):

Miss Helen Ketola

Librarian

There are a couple of incidents with Miss Ketola that haunt me.

One day I was reading in the library and had my feet on the chair on the other side of the table. Miss Ketola came up to me and flung a rag on the table in front of me, told me that chairs were not for feet and demanded that I dust it off. I dusted it and NEVER put my feet on a chair in her library ever again. The lesson was a good one but I think that the method was a bit extreme.

Then one day I was looking for something like "The World Almanac and Book of Facts." I wanted to know when something like an eclipse or meteor shower was going to happen. I asked Miss Ketola something like "Where are the almanacs that tell me what's going to happen?" Her answer was "You stupid child, almanacs can't tell you what will happen! They tell what happened in the previous year!" (She didn't say quite those words but that was the tone of her answer.) I was so stunned that I couldn't explain that I knew the almanac would have the information I was looking for and still wanted to look something up. I left with my tail between my legs.

I must have made peace with Miss Ketola. At some point of my stay at Pueblo I worked behind the desk at the library. I don't know how I got that job. Was it an honor or penance?

There was a bit of terror in the junior high library that I brought on myself. There was a book on taxidermy that I checked out. I thought it might be kind of neat to stuff my own small mammals and frogs. It got scarier and scarier as I read through it. You have to kill the animals! They suggested several ways. There was putting them in a jar with ether. That put them to sleep then suffocated them. That was a peaceful way for them to go. A quicker way was to poison them with cyanide. "Just run down to your local drugstore and ask the pharmacist for a bottle. Be very careful with it. Just a tiny bit on your tongue will kill you almost instantly." I didn't want to kill little animals it turned out and I didn't want to kill myself. That was the end of my taxidermy career.

Back then could you really get cyanide at your local drugstore? Or even ether?

At Los Alamos High School we didn't have a library. We had an "Instructional Materials Center" (what we called "the IMC").

The head of the library's IMC's Code Enforcement Department was Mrs. Arntzen.

Mary Jean Arntzen
Librarian

I really don't remember much about Mrs. Arntzen. The reason I remember anything about her was because an English class assignment. I don't know what we were studying. It could have been English poetry. For the assignment I wrote a parody of "The Constant Lover" by Sir John Suckling. I called it "The Constant Shover/Ode to Miss Arntzen" (I thought all librarians were unmarried). The premise was that if you broke any IMC rule, you were summarily shoved out of the building by Ms. Arntzen. Who amongst us hasn't broken a library rule? She was a busy woman.

Lucky for you I didn't keep a copy of my poem. It wasn't very good but it was well received by the class. Apparently they had similar feelings about Ms. Arntzen. All I remember about the poem was the title and that it ended with her shoving "A dozen dozen from their place."


I'm outta here!

Someone to mooch from?

Google sends me messages telling me when keywords show up in news articles. Yesterday I got a link to this article. Is he related? If he makes it to the big times do you suppose we can get good seats at his concerts?

Time Flies

I've got to get a life. Here, already, are the next 100 glimpses of our lives.

We have Christmas, 1959, followed by a single slide of Jack in his skivvies on a hunting trip, followed by Christmas, 1960.

I love the matching jammies my sisters got to wear (but I don't see how they could have slept with all that glare). The Christmas 1959 pictures were overexposed. I tried to fix them up but you can do only so much tweaking before the dust on the slides becomes the main feature.

The next Christmas we all have matching jammy bottoms.

Then we're off to Dayton, Ohio. Was that trip the only time I've ever seen fireflies? Or was that some other time?

The last series of pictures in this batch has us clowning around. That seems strange. What happened that made that kind of behavior unacceptable? The pink isn't my fault...I guess Jack got some bargain film. Maybe I should have turned them into black and white.

Update: I decided to change the pink pictures to black and white.  I'm thinking that the film was monochrome but somehow the processor made them pink.  The final pictures don't look like they came from faded color originals.

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Yet more adorable children

Here is the next carousel of slides. We go from Christmas, 1957, to August, 1959. We look like we enjoyed each other. I wish that Dad would have let someone else take an occasional picture with him in it. I wonder what he looked like through these years.

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Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Cast glass.

MLM: Who?

One day at college I got the following certificate in my mailbox.


I don't know who nominated me, what meritorious accomplishments I achieved, nor who voted to include me. But, gosh, I was elected to Who's Who Among Students in American Universities & Colleges! Once again my name was misspelled so I'm not sure that it really counts.

I passed up the opportunity to buy a copy of the book that included my (misspelled) name. I haven't regretted that decision for a moment. I could have submitted a biography (for a fee) but I passed on that opportunity, too. I could have included this honor on my resume but I forgot to.

I wonder who does the fact checking on the biographies the honorees submit for themselves.