Musings on a Small Life

Snapshots from September 2008. I know I'm always posting the same pics, just from different months and years, but of course this was their lives.  Below: Another day in the garden, another insect to snack on. Derry was very good at insect-catching. Nicki didn't have the patience, so the occasional time that he did catch his own, I think it must have been from sheer luck.  As for other memories: Among the few childhood items that Mom had left for me were 55 slides, dating back from my birth in 1964. I took them to our downtown camera store and had them scanned and transferred onto a memory stick. I picked them up Saturday afternoon and then spent a bit of time editing as necessary, for size and colour. I'll refrain from posting any blurry pics of me as a baby, bare backside, lying on a couch. LOL. (There were two of those!) These three below were taken when I was about five-ish, at Haldimand Beach in Gaspé, so probably 1969, give or take a year. Mom would have been in her la...

I've been looking through some older albums the past couple of days, and wow, we had a lot of snow at the beginning of February 2008 ! (With apologies to the one or two who might have seen these pics before, long ago.) A young (and much slimmer) Derry bounding through the snow in the back space.             Nicki looking for a way over the fence...then and now. LOL. And a bonus pic of Annie during the latter part of February 2008, when she still was healthy. We had about an inch or two of snow last night, but so far (knock on wood), we've had nothing like the snowfall of winter 2008. Mind you, February is just starting! (Last year we had that blizzard the second or third week of February, with 50+ cms of snow in 13 hours. The blizzard I had to slog through to get home, because buses couldn't run. I won't soon forget it!) Anyway, I hope everyone's having a good day, with no (additional) snow.  :-) Peace . Comments are off tod...

I got my dad's birthday card in yesterday's mail, and on the back he had glued a very old, small school photo, taken in 1978. (Don't laugh too hard...It was the 70s after all, and in the boonies, and I was only 14.) I know the photo is of my much, much younger self, but looking at it, I don't recognize it as "me," if that makes sense. I do recognize the horse tee-shirt, though! All I thought (quite seriously) was, Poor girl, you don't know what's to come in future decades . But of course that's a good thing, as none of us would have the courage to carry on if we did. One thing is certain: I never was photogenic at any age!  :-P Purrs from the boys and peace from me.

I was looking for a pic the other day, sunflowers I had snapped while Dad was here a couple of years ago. I stumbled across this rare shot of me holding Annie, which Dad snapped in August 2010. Can you tell how much she hated to be picked up? And hated the camera, any camera? LOL. But of course now I wish I had more photos of her with me, in spite of her protests. I miss her every day, though I suppose as the years pass that will fade, as it has with Chumley. Rarer still, however, are some of the old family pics that Dad had scanned in and sent to his brother quite some time ago, and finally sent me yesterday. This was dad's mother's mother. I'm not sure if this is Grandma's father (didn't think his name was Fritz, though) or another distant relative. Dad must be named for him, though! Except for Dad's father, in the lower right corner, I don't know who these men are. Theodor would have been on the maternal side of the fam...

I've been home today, de-cluttering the house in a burst of pre-Spring cleaning. You should see the garage; it's filled with "stuff" for donation, again. ("Again" because I'm not a pack rat and de-clutter a couple of times a year.) Wait, maybe it's better that you don't see the garage! Anyway, that has absolutely nothing to do with old family photos, other than I pulled these off a shelf while going through one of the spare rooms. The very old photos are of my paternal grandmother's parents, when they obviously were quite young. I think my uncle, Dad's younger brother, has the originals. They need a professional photo-restorer, really. Auguste Scheffel, born 1879, Libau, Latvia Johan Borowski, born 1880 in Libau, Latvia If I have the details incorrect, I'm sure Dad can let me know. I got this information from a genealogy my mom had done a few years ago, and she got the information from Grandma, via a written account, year...

I did find the photo of my dad when he was 18 or 19 or so. I don't think quite 20. First year of university, perhaps? Wasn't he handsome? I don't think I'm biased...Well, perhaps a bit. :-)

I love looking at old photographs, from the early days of the camera. Can't say I have any of those--oh, except a copy of one photo each of my maternal great grandparents when they were very young--but last week Dad emailed me scanned-in versions of a couple of 1956 pics a friend of his had. I've seen very few photos of Dad as a teenager, so these were great. I keep telling him to go through his albums and start scanning in pictures to email me, but as he still works (substitute teaches in his post-retirement years), he really doesn't have the time. Or the inclination, I think. Maybe he ought to bring just one album when he visits in the fall, and I'll scan them in! Dad on the right, perched on the post. Pic taken in August 1956, so he'd have been 16, about 2 months shy of his 17th birthday. Left to right: Dad in the background, the friend's father, Dad's father, and the younger boy is Dad's brother, Peter, we think. September 1956 out at Lac Long, in...