Flowers & Camera

We had some blue sky peaking through on Sunday so I went outside and planted some more flowers. When I finished with the oak barrels and got everything watered I went inside and grabbed my camera. Figured I might as well get a few pictures of the lilies and roses. I played around with the light settings as there was shade and clouds as well as sunlight. I really have no idea what I'm doing so I definitely need to study up on that in order to improve. I had some fun with the editing process. It can be tedious going through a lot of photos and correcting them for lighting, etc., but can be fun when you play around with the cropping and turn them into oil paintings and swirls and change the colors. I wish I didn't find reading the manuels so incredibly boring.

TOPS

One of the groups I belong to is called TOPS. It stands for Take Off Pounds Sensibly. We have a great group and I am the current leader. We can have fun anywhere as evidenced by our annual service project. Each year (a week or so after Memorial Day) we clean up the flowers and flags that are left at Mt. View Cemetery so the grounds crew can mow. The weather was great and the cemetery beautiful. We joke around and it's a chance to get to know some of the members a little better. We're a daytime group so a lot of our members are in their 70's and 80's. We have a couple of people in their 30's & 40's, but most of us are 50+. It's great to see how active some of them are. I hope I do half as well. Mary, the gal who organizes this each year is 82, still lives on her own (just bought a condo and had it remodeled), makes and donates baby quilts to a hospital and still drives (I've ridden with her - no problem there). I'm going over to her place tomorrow and help her tie some more baby quilts.

Why You Say It

There is a very picturesque little town in central Oregon called Sisters. It derives it's name from some mountains nearby and any new buildings that go up have to keep to the old west type of look. It's home to a wonderful outdoor quilt show each July and lots of wonderful little shops. In a shop called The Hen's Tooth, I picked up a fun book called Why You Say It. The subtitle is The Fascinating Stories Behind Over 600 Everyday Words and Phrases and the author is Webb Garrison. There are so many words and phrases that we use everyday and don't really think about where they came from. It can sometimes be pretty interesting or funny when you find out how the word or phrase originated. For instance -

Get the Sack
These days, an assembly line worker or an executive who gets the sack may receive severance pay plus a printed explanation.
As early as the 17th century, cloth bags were in literal rather than figurative use. Craftsmen and artisans provided their own tools as a rule, storing them in a sturdy sack.
When an employer was ready to dismiss a worker, it was common to hand him his tool sack. No explanation was necessary; the gesture meant "Put your tools in the sack, and get going."
As a result of this practice, a person who wouldn't know a drill from a tailor's needle is said to "get the sack" when fired from a job.

While some of the entries are from centuries past and may surprise us, others are more recent and make sense to us because we are aware of it's origin or the event that inspired the phrase.

Now, of what use this information will be to me I have no idea, but it's fun to pick up once in awhile and read a few.

Rain Rain Go Away

Rain rain go away, come again another day!
I know, I know, I'm supposed to have webbed feet being an Oregonian and all, but I'm really a fair weather person when it comes to being outside. I still haven't planted the rest of my flowers because it has rained the entire week! Of course if I hadn't been such a slow poke in the first place I could just sit back and enjoy the fact that Mother Nature is doing the watering for me. My lettuce, cukes and tomatoes are certainly enjoying it and thriving.

Today Big Bear and I went over to K & D's for what turned out to be an indoor picnic. The rain had let up by this morning, but it was still too cold and dreary to sit outside so we visited and ate indoors. There were four couples and it was very nice and relaxing. K & D barbacued steaks, I brought potato salad, and the other two brought a green salad and a fresh fruit salad. Very nice indeed.

A.D.D. and A.D.H.D.

Several years ago I was running a small bookstore and did a lot of special orders for people. I was asked to order a book called Driven to Distraction and as was my habit when confronted with a book I hadn't seen before I gave it a quick scan. As I leafed through the first few pages I read some things that made me say "Oh oh, I need to read this one". I had heard of A.D.D. and A.D.H.D., but knew almost nothing about it. Suddenly here was a book describing what I'd been dealing with my whole life. Here are 20 symptoms they list that are often evident in a person with ADD or ADHD. They are:

1. A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one's goals (regardless of how much one has accomplished).
2. Difficulty getting organized.
3. Chronic procrastination or trouble getting started.
4. Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow-through.
5. Tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timeing or appropriateness of the remark.
6. An ongoing search for high stimulation.
7. A tendency to be easily bored.
8. Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation, often coupled with an ability to focus at times.
9. Often creative, intuitive, highly intelligent.
10. Trouble going through established channels, following proper procedure.
11. Impatient; low tolerance for frustration.
12. Impulsive, either verbally or in action, as in impulsive spending of money, changing plans, enacting new schemes or career plans, and the like.
13. Tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly; tendency to scan the horizon looking for something to worry about. alternating with inattention to, or disregard for, actual dangers.
14. Sense of impending doom, insecurity, alternating with high risk-taking.
15. Depression, especially when disengaged from a project.
16. Restlessness.
17. Tendency toward addictive behavior.
18. Chronic problems with self-esteem.
19. Inaccurate self-observation.
20. Family history of ADD or manic-depressive illness, depression, substance abuse or other disorders of impulse control or mood.