Byzantine endeavors
Meet Apple Mouse.
I took the solstice off. There was nothing terribly byzantine about most of my day. Early morning walk, coffee with friends, a couple shopping expotitions, cleaning, wrapping a few packages (don’t worry kids, I don’t have much). After all that, I walked over to the Plum and picked up a duck to cook on xmas and a pheasant for some other time. It seemed to be Exotic Bird Day over at the Plum so I snagged the pheasant because I know I will not see one of those just hanging about again for a while.
True story: Once upon a time, a pheasant* hit the Moomincabin picture window and died and The Commander and Esther Sherman plucked the feathers off it, cleaned it up, and cooked it for dinner. *Or maybe a grouse, see comments 🐸
Anyway, Mouse and the GG were out death marching around Waterloo somewhere so I was happily spacified and then, npJane texted that she had something to drop off here and wondered if anyone was home. Well. “I am!” It didn’t take too much persuading for her to have a glass o’ whine with me and before we knew it, almost two hours had elapsed. Cousins (of all degrees) absolutely ROCK!
The other day, I got off on a tangent about my ancient xmas newsletters. Today I went looking for them, both on my laptop and hard-copy. I found them on my laptop but try as I might, I could not get the images to show up (I could see them in the word doc preview). Yes, I googled around to pretty much no avail.
I ended up emailing them to my work address and, voila, Word on my Windows musheen opened them with the images intact. So… I used Snagit to capture them all and save them to jpg format, then I sent them back to my personal email as attachments. All of this McGyvering worked wonderfully but it reminded me tooooo much of the original McGyvering I had to do to get the original images into the original documents. Except that involved actual paper and spanners scanners and things.
After all of those Byzantine endeavors, on a hunch, I opened up Photos on my *personal* laptop and searched for “newsl” and wouldn’t you know, I have a whole folder called “Newsletter Scans” in there where I apparently managed to save the images at some point and have apparently totally forgotten that I did that. Jeebus.
I love the images in those old newsletters but I cannot BELIEVE how AWFUL my writing was! All the complaining I did about how frantic life was and how we were always scrambling around for money to fix multitudes of broken appliances and cars and fighting off umpteen bazillion viruses. Did I really send these newsletters out? I do not remember things being that bad at all. We had a good life in a comfortable house with wonderful children. Maybe one of these days when I am bored, I will compile some of the out-takes.
December 21st, 2017 at 5:57 pm
Might the cabin window fatality have been a grouse? It has happened a few times here. Hmmmmm. Grouse and pheasant taste a lot a like. Ray frequently hunted pheasants in Ohio lands that were stocked with pheasants by his sportsmen’s club. I can remember a few years back when I was driving a new car to Whitefish Point in the fall, I hit a grouse and there was a cloud of feathers in my rear view mirror. I quickly stopped and tracked in the general area where the bird had landed. I was so proud of myself for bringing home supper, but felt awful about the poor bird.
December 21st, 2017 at 8:33 pm
Those letters would be fun to read! When I look at my old newsletters, I realize how much life has changed. I didn’t brag (mostly), and was honest about struggles(to a point) but the nostalgia can get to me easily, especially this time of year.