Phooling around with Photo Booth

Looks like a Statue of Liberty impression! I received a cute notepad thing from Charlotte and thought a visual thank you would have more meaning for her than just writing or calling. This was a reason to open and for the first time use Photo Booth on the computer (iMac). I knew Kristine and the Booth kin had hooted and hollered over it when she first got her laptop, but I'd not investigated the program in all the time I've had this computer. Well... the first image below was what I wanted to send to Charlotte, but after that, I played with the effects. There are others besides this "Funhouse Mirrors" section (my name... not theirs). It was all I could do to squelch my own laughter (to the point of tears) while taking these photos. I thought one of them made me look like the guy from The Incredibles. ;-)

Anyway... before writing, I'll drop those in... enjoy. :-)


I just realized this is in mirror image of my actual face and bedroom layout. I don't wear my wedding ring on the right hand! I'll have to flip this and see how it compares.

That's how my face actually looks. I think I liked the backwards version better. ;-)
Now for the goofy stuff... backwards but does it matter?!





Aah... that's gotta' be the best one. ;-)

Here are a couple of the screenshots Diane got the other day (Skype). The first one is cute with bird's head showing above Diane's inset frame:


On my screen, birdy was seeing a large image of Diane's face as she talked to him and whistled. It was funny to see him react to her.

[Warning... this is doubling as a journal so the following is a personal indulgence that will surely be less interesting to others.]

I had an interesting encounter yesterday after getting done at the dentist's office and running a couple of soap orders to the post office and UPS Store. I almost didn't stop but on a last minute impulse, swung into the Walgreen's to replace the horrible hair gel I've been using instead of the one I'd really wanted. The containers looked nearly identical and I'd tossed the old one before making a note of the exact name. Anyway... I cruised in there to check for a replacement and the first person I see when I entered was a classmate from the old Chico Elementary School (now the home of King's West Christian School... near Erland's Point). The last time I bumped into her was a couple of weeks after her mother had passed away and we'd had a little chat at Costco. I'll bet that was two years ago because the cute little granddaughter she had with her is three years old now. Her mother was a girl who was part of Michael's high school crowd and she'd been here a few times. Her little girl is very friendly and verbal and looks a bit like her mother in the face.

Anyway... the "other grandma" and I ended up chatting and it stretched into a trip into our pasts... maybe 30 minutes worth of talking? I'm not sure. We'd been friends when we were little but she was pulled into the popular crowd by junior high (she said they came after her) and I'd become ostracized by then, thanks to a kid in the class who became very popular and chose to use his influence in that way. She was friendly with him then and has bumped into him quite often even now and was more aware of his family dynamics than I ever knew. He's had a very high profile job in this town for a long time and has been successful in his career, but troubled in family and personal life issues. Hearing her perspective was somewhat enlightening. He just had to be the best and first at everything... the pressure he felt as a kid to be the "star" of his family must have been horrendous. It doesn't excuse some of his bad behavior (thank goodness I was never an actual girlfriend), but it fills in some blanks. It shouldn't matter at this point, but when you've suffered at the hands of someone over a period of years as a kid, it forever changes who you are... especially when it's in such a publicly humiliating way and you feel you are standing alone. I'm not angry at him anymore over it, but it's still part of my personal history.

After she mentioned some family stuff I'd never known, I told her the fact I ran faster than he did back then probably didn't help me any (he was a gifted athlete) and she said, "You were his intellectual equal... and he couldn't handle that." I never thought I was any smarter than she was, but I was probably less likely to agree with him if I thought he was wrong (and like most of the girls in our class, I had a huge crush on this kid... I was getting more of his attention than anyone and even though it was negative, it was some sort of notice).

Leanne has been a school teacher for years and just retired about a year ago, so she has a different perspective than me about our childhood and school experiences. She was probably more critcal in retrospect of some of our teachers and the fact she felt we didn't learn much from them. Also, she asked if I hadn't noticed how many kids from one particular gradeschool were brought into the accelerated class in junior high (they'd call it gifted now). She felt that was rigged and that the school in question had graded kids too high that were not really qualified to be there. I never thought much about it and didn't know what everyone's grades were... so never gave it much thought. Maybe her experience now as a teacher made her realize that such things can happen and likely did.

We laughed about the trouble we got into in first grade with some of our recess games (I'd come up with the whole sitting on eggs thing... rocks we gleaned from the playground... and the boys would try to steal them). I got sent out of class one day after smuggling one of my "eggs" into class and proceeding to lay it at the back of the room. This exercise was accompanied by loud clucking, etc. ;-) That poor teacher was the same one that one day in frustration said to me, "All right, Kathy... if you're so smart, why don't you come up and teach the class?" (Which confused me at the age of six, but I walked up front, took the yardstick from her hand and proceeded to do what she'd been doing... pointing to words on the blackboard and calling on students to read them. Looked pretty simple. Five years later it dawned on me that she was trying to get me to pipe down!)

Leanne laughed at a memory of my ponytail at one point being straight across the bottom because my dad had cut it off to even it out. I don't remember him ever cutting my hair, but maybe he took a whack on it for some reason. :-) The most surprising thing she shared was how she was mistreated by the mother of a mutual friend during her interface with them. The mother was her Bluebird leader and she apparently didn't like Leanne and pulled some sabotaging stuff you'd expect more from a teenage girl... not a grown woman. I guess she was going to be the Campfire leader when the group moved up and that was a deciding factor for Leanne to just drop out. The mother was always nice to me, although she was an unusual person... somewhat nervous temperament. When I was about 10, her daughter announced to me that her mother was an alcoholic. I'd never paid close attention to what she was drinking when I stayed over... it was always in a cup on the TV table. I suspect she would have handled some things better if she'd not had that issue and it surely shortened her life.

Having this sort of chat with someone from your past is not unlike one you can have with an adult sibling... where you compare notes and realize how differently you experienced some of the same events and context. Leanne had no clue how much I was suffering in my daily clashes with Danny... she thought I was handling it just fine. She said if that had been her she would have really come apart. I think I felt at the time I was handling it okay, although it was very uncomfortable. I remember wishing things were different but vowing that no matter what, he was not going to make me cry or show weakness under attack. I guess I did too good a job... or kids are just often not aware because we're all surviving and dealing with our own stuff. Everything about me seemed to be open to scrutiny and ridicule when possible, but at the same time this kid wanted to know what grades I was getting. One particular day in 6th grade, he demanded to know what I got on a Science test and I'd gotten an A. He asked if I'd read the chapter and I said I'd read part of it, but no... I'd not gotten the whole thing finished. His comment, "I read that chapter three times and I got a C on that test!" It almost sounded like I'd purposely done something to injure him with his tone of voice. Wasn't my fault. Excuse me for goofing off but somehow managing a good grade on the test. That was my crime, I suppose.

My advocate and hero during those two difficult gradeschool years (5th and 6th grade) was a wet behind the ears English teacher... Mr. Joe Hopkins. He was nearly 25 years old when he came onboard and at the end of one of those years, was getting married. He had wedding bells on the calendar for the week of his marriage... each successive set of bells getting larger and larger until the day of. He was a little disheveled around the edges with unruly straight blonde hair, dark horn-rimmed glasses and a tendency for one eye to drift when his glasses were taken off to shoot a few baskets with the Science teacher. He cried openly the day Kennedy was shot (we were informed while in class) and was unknowingly the butt of some jokes dished out by the kid who gave me such a hard time. Mr. Hopkins was not "cool" and maybe today he would be called a little "nerdy" around the edges... but he cared about people. This teacher tried to stop what was going on and talked to the two of us a couple of times alone and pulled me aside after one of the most demoralizing class periods (class elections) and gave me some words of comfort and told me that someday he was going to have a daughter just like me. He let me know that someone saw what was going on and they didn't think it was okay. I still get choked up when I remember that minute I was held after class... he reached out and straightened my collar as he said it. In my twenties I wrote him a letter after tracking down an address for him and he said receiving it really made his day. He'd gotten out of regular teaching and was working more in a special needs environment in Oregon at that time.

Getting back to the visit with Leanne... one other thing she commented on was how different our lives might have been if there had been the opportunities and resources for girls then that they have now... particularly she was speaking of sports. She would have turned out for baseball in a heartbeat and I would have turned out for track and field, had they had such a thing for girls. I was a fast sprinter back then... just barely caught the bus more times than I can name! These days I can barely walk briskly without some kind of ache and pain setting in! ;-)

Well... it is what it is. We'd have to have lived now to appreciate and take advantage of those opportunities, because we wouldn't have had the sense of entitlement this generation does... male and female. If we felt we were breaking some kind of social rule or were not wanted in those areas, we were less likely to push the issue. For my part, I don't know that it would have changed my choices in a profound way... but it might have been a lot of fun. :-) I always looked forward to being married and having a family. It wasn't a popular or glamorous choice in the era in which I did it... but it's been fine and I have no regrets on that front. You just don't get a lot of appreciation for what you do the same way people receive in a career. There are daily rewards, but also tons of tedium and frustration and often feeling unfulfilled and undervalued... but it's the bigger picture that matters most. It can take years for those payoffs to be evident. :-)

Well... that's my personal trivia for the day. Not nearly as important as the recent election that I've not mentioned. I was not totally smitten with either candidate, so I'm neither devastated by the outcome nor thrilled beyond measure. I hope Obama will be safe as he enters his years in the White House and that he will be blessed with wisdom. He has a huge task ahead of him. He'll need all of our bi-partisan prayers.