Just For The Elephant!

At the library I use a lot, there's a little glass case with shelves, used for local residents to display their collections of little objects. Kids as well as adults do this, so the displays range from origami made by a master of the art, to little structures created by a second grader from Lego, to Fimo fruit and vegetables. Very small town kind of thing, even though the town isn't so small any more. I like that the libe has kept this going.

At the moment, one of my favorite displays of all time is on show: a wonderful collection of elephants, from half an inch in size to several inches, in every material you can think of, from jade to carved filigree wood, to ceramic, glass, fabric, origami, metals,you name it. Some of them are baby elephants, trunks waving wildly and legs all over the place.

Which reminds me of a documentary about African elephants I saw a while ago, where two of the babies suddenly decided to be Bad Elephants, and run away from their moms! hilarious scene of the babies, waving their trunks, giggling insanely in elephantspeak, stumbling and trotting away from the herd, with giant moms and aunts suddenly realizing, when they were on their way to the horizon, that they were off, and setting off themselves in pursuit, to round them up and herd them back again.

So I took pix for your viewing pleasure of the local collection of elephants, all facing one way, toward the window, which I think is supposed to be the "right" way to do it! enjoy, and enlarge the pictures to see them better.

Plainsboro Preserve and fleece updates..

Major thunderstorms yesterday, lightning, sheets of rain, the lot, so today when HP's aide was with him I had the chance to run to the Preserve for half an hour to see what was up. Just a couple of minutes' drive away. It's very sandy soil, so it doesn't flood, but it's interesting to see what the birds and butterflies are up to after the storm. They usually get very active on a day like today, and I wasn't disappointed.

Right in front of me on the gravel trail, a dusky swallowtail butterfly obligingly sat while I took pix with his wings open and shut. This has been a poor butterfly year because they don't show up in cool rainy weather, needing dry air and sunshine on their wings to get any loft at all.







And a pair of flickers were careening all over the place, up and down a dead tree, perfect flicker territory, since they're a kind of woodpecker and peck for insects in dead wood. And the barnswallows were out in force, and the cardinals, which used to be summer visitors but long ago became year round residents. It was before climate change was talked about and I think it was about building in this part of the world, resulting in back yards with bird feeders, so no need to venture very far to get your winter's groceries. Robins also made the same adaptation, though we do have a big influx in the spring of the ones who still migrate.


And good old milkweed, with raindrops still on it, butterfly food for monarchs, of which I have seen exactly ONE this year.



Meanwhile, back on the patio, carding of fleece is going on apace. I'm not very traditional about this, since I have a detective story (Dick Francis, to be precise) going in my CD headset while I card! but it's lovely to see the grotty, twiggy old fleece turning into soft lovely rolags (like wool sausages) ready to spin, so I thought you'd like to see a before and after here, too. It is certainly a lot easier to card using the actual tools, rather than a couple of little dog slicker brushes.






My idea is to get all my fleece carded before the weather turns cool and wet in the fall, because it's good to do out of doors -- the spare fluff and twigs are blown away or easily swept up, very pleasing. And I plan to put out the discarded fluff for bird nests. I already filled a suet feeder with fluff, just to see if there's any interest at this time of year. In spring it will almost certainly be a big hit.

I am guessing the bluejays will make short work of it in their nest building, since they love fluff, even cutting out the middle man and stealing it off the back of sleeping pets out of doors.

My old dog Buff used to sleep on the balcony of an apartment I used to live in years ago, and I'd hear a yelp as a bluejay descended on his fluffy back and yanked out a beakful of hair, flying away with a blond mustache to the nest in progress.

Jersey Fresh and Hope for the UN

Aside from visiting farms (and realizing I misspelled their name in my previous post, even though I had a big picture up with the correct spelling on their signboard, sigh, did you know, incidentally that one of the most misspelled words in the language is the word misspelled? there you can rest easy, knowing that) where was I, oh yes, I grow food in my tiny little area here too, and friends keep me supplied from Columbus Market, a huge ancient open air flea market and farmers' market.

So when I put our lunch out the other day, I realized just how pretty your food is when it's mainly fruit and vegetables, with no dull old meat, or little of it. We had Jersey tomato salad and baby cucumber salad over mixed greens (yes, there's a bit of cubed Danish ham i there, too, not Jersey stuff) courtesy of friend who picked it up for me at Columbus, followed by Jersey blueberries over other fruit from unknown sources such as Florida. I tossed the salad with a bit of wine vinegar and good olive oil. And held HP off while I took pictures and he cracked up laughing at me.

So we ate fairly locally, Columbus being half an hour away. But we eat even more locally, too, and I have pix to prove it:



Potatoes, growing in a container on the patio. I just shove a potato from the supermarket that's started to sprout, and, after the foliage has grown up and died down, dig up a nice meal or two of new potatoes.



Peppers, growing in a container on the patio, you can enlarge the pic to actually see them, it's early yet!



Roma plum tomatoes growing in the upside down container outside the front door.



Cherry bushes growing in the ground along the walkway, next to nasturtiums in a container, which are nice salad food, very peppery. Too small to picture are the tiny baby blueberry bushes, which put out a grand total of three berries this year, their first, but I have hopes for next year, if I can get ahead of the birds.




And Cumberland Black Raspberry canes, outside the back fence, planted in the ground, where the fence will contain them on one side and the landscapers will mow on the other, came to me courtesy of Freecycle from a nice English lady who wanted to give me a lot of other vegetable and fruit starts, but I have no room for them.

And we grow our own herbs, of course, very easy in containers, all kinds of herbs, which I add to food all the time. Nothing like picking your own basil and other things, and rushing right in to use them. Pesto this year is planned, from the basil I grew from seed.


Finally, the Adams contribution to world peace, since I already bragged about our whirled peas growing everywhere, I present you Kitty Detente: Duncan conferring with Persian Fluffy Sheba, who ventured downstairs from her personal apartment upstairs, for the first time in months, and hates Marigold and is bullied usually by Duncan, then Duncan practices shuttle diplomacy by going over to Marigold to explain that Fluffy comes in peace.





For the first time in their joint history, all three cats were in one room at one time. Fluffy visited with HP, first time he's seen her in months (can't carry her down to show him, she bites), and having made her point with the others, retreated upstairs again and spent the night in her usual basket.

There's hope for the U.N. yet.

My Friends and Other Animals!

With apologies to Gerald Durrell and thanks for my title today.

Yesterday was a wonderful day of stuff happening: good medical reports from visiting nurse, happy aide visit full of reports of her little girl's progress and their upcoming trip home to Ecuador to reunite FIVE generations of her family, lunch and visit from old neighborhood friend up here for a couple of weeks from Florida, lovely visit with her, total catchup, including tips for me on a tshirt quilt (to use up a bunch of colorful old tshirts of HP's which have meaning to him but are not really wearable any more, too small for someone who needs a lot of help dressing, but will be a great bed cover in the cold weather) and tips for her on starting a blog, which I fervently hope she will.

She's a person with all kinds of talents, has gone from high powered professional work into equally high powered volunteering, including learning xeriscaping for the landscape of her Florida development, better for the climate, to playing poker with veterans in a local hospital and enjoying their lives and stories, to adventures in art and craft and travel and who knows what else. She has a ton to say and I really hope she gets going to say it. I plan to be a follower as soon as she gets under way!

And one of her major talents is for friendship. She not only included the Adams menage in her brief trip up here, but brought lunch with her to save me the extra work, knowing my life is pretty hectic.

Wonderful lunch from Whole Foods, complete with sourdough bread, various salads, strawberries. And a soup which I completely forgot to serve, which just shows, even when someone does all the work for me I still forget something. Nonetheless it served us for today's lunch, with the rest of the salads and sourdough. Carrot ginger soup, very very good, and HP wants me to make it as soon as I find out how. The weather turned obligingly cool and wet, just right for soup.

Said friend, Bernadette M., and we were talking about how we don't like to be given objects as gifts any more -- we have enough stuff, and it's just more stuff. We all agreed that we loved consumables and services much better. And I suddenly realized that I'd described the gift of shopping and bringing lunch -- that was both a service and a consumable gift, and such a terrific thing to do. HS arrived in the evening, to do the pacemaker check successfully, so that was a full day, including a viewing of Foyle's War, until we both fell asleep over it...

And then today, along the lines of opportunities that were NOT missed, unlike the sunflowers and sundogs, on the way back from the libe with various things for HP's reading and viewing pleasure, I had three things happen all at once: when I passed the horse farm, there were horses out on the field, munching and nudging each other and being horses, there was NO traffic so I could get off the road, and I had my camera with me.

So I got pix! and realized, that as I was angling my camera through the fence for a better picture, that the horses were equally interested in me! in fact I had to back off to get one into the picture. I'm guessing they saw something in my hand and figured it was worth finding out if it was edible. So they posed for their closeup, which took place after one finishing peeing copiously all over....a bit excited over company maybe.





Just off on a tangent: these horses are in sight of the place where Orson Welles' famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast fooled people into thinking the Martians had landed -- Grover's Mill.

It occurs to me to wonder, don't ask me why I wonder stuff like this, I just do, the labyrinthine recesses of the human mind are impenetrable, if there's a connection between equine, as in horses, and equinox, as in equal day and night. I must pursue this.

Then almost home and I stopped off at Stultz Farm, a pick it yourself family owned operation for generations, and I have to pay homage to a Republican governor of NJ, Christie Whitman, under whose reign if that's the word, the TDR act came into force.







Now it's not often I acknowledge good work from Republicans, even though once in a while I do vote for one....as Susan K knows(!) but fair's fair, this is a brilliant piece of legislation for a state that was once all agricultural, and is rapidly being paved over because the location between NY and Philly is very very valuable real estate, not to mention it's a shore state with harbors and ports, etc., all good for business.


TDR , if you will allow me to bore you a moment, is Transfer of Development Rights. It means that farmers who are paying terrible taxes because their lands are being pushed up and up in value beyond their ability as smallholders to stay in the farming biz, rather than throw up their hands and sell for a lot of money to developers, can offer instead to sell the development rights to the state of NJ for a very very fair price, in exchange for farming there in perpetuity, either by succeeding family members or tenant farmers. Either way, no building ever ever to take place.

Quite a bit of farmland (second in yield per acre only to the Shenandoah Valley, you see why it's crime to build on it) has been saved around here, including this farm. Which I have pictured for you, to see how lovely it is, simple, clean, fertile, growing a huge variety of crops and flowers. Close to home, not quite walking distance but not far.

And the value is sky high if you think of the old quality of life cliche!

It's a huge gift to the rest of us -- not more stuff, wonderful land full of consumables and a service to us, too. Yay.

Sky and missed chances

Couple of days ago, I was returning from a local Freecycle foray (all my forays are local nowadays, since my free time is in increments of about 15 minutes, the max I can leave HS without special arrangements, anyway very local trip) and saw a field of sunflowers, all at peak. A whole field of them facing my way, and a flood near the roadside, reflecting them wonderfully. At the time there was traffic and on these narrow roads there's no side of the road to pull over on, if you don't want to end up a statistic, so I thought I'd pop back later in the day when there was no traffic, and get pix of them.

One of the things I do for HS to keep him anchored in the outside world is to take pix with my digi and show him what I've seen and enjoyed. He hugely appreciates this. Even pictures of the parts of the yard he can't get to.

Soooooo. later on that afternoon, I nipped back up that same road, and noticed, hm, a tractor, that wasn't there this morning, but what the heck, it will be a nice feature in my pictures. Found a good turnaround, where the tractors turn, in fact, so I could be, illegally, off the road for just long enough to take a picture or two.

And realized that the tractor had HARVESTED my sunflower scene! there was the flood, and there beyond it newly turned earth....well, I know they're a cash crop, and all that, but heck they could have waited ONE DAY for me to get the picture. I guess the farmer agreed with me that they were at peak. Sigh. No pix.

Today, the skies were wonderful, a low humidity warm sunshine perfect day, and I saw a sundog in the sky. You know these? we get them quite a lot, a chunk of rainbow on a cloud. You sometimes see them at four points of the compass up in the sky, wonderful fleeting sight. Mostly they're a winter phenomenon, so this was unusual.

Dashed into the house for camera, ran out, and there was the sundog, gone. I told you it was fleeting.

So I present for your entertainment a few nice sky pix, and ask you to visualize a lovely chunk of rainbow on the second cloud from the left....which reminds me strongly of the old joke where a proud mom says to her friend, listen to that violinist on the radio. I told you my son would make good! friend listens, very impressed and says, wow, you're right, he's wonderful. Oh, that's not my son, that's Itzak Perlman, but it's exactly how my son would sound if he practiced..or the joke about buying a piece of the ladder that Jacob dreamed of...

Lovely afternoon, HP and I out on the patio enjoying birds and clouds and the little dog next door trying to burrow his way under the fence to visit us. And the fullgrown sparrows still insisting on being fed by their exhausted parents. One bird right near us, clearly a kid, not worried about us at all, was standing in food, asking to be fed. Tired out mom pecks up some seed, stuffs it into the baby's beak, and stalks away. You could just see her thinking, dammit, other people's kids move OUT at this age...

Partnership art , renovation and reverie

Many many years ago, HS designed and created a couple of tshirts for himself, own design, mottoes on back, everything. A couple of years back he donated them to me to have, frame, whatever I thought would be good. And finally I realized the best way to see and enjoy them would be to make them into pillows, which I duly did this week, and show you fronts and backs. They're so HIM at that age, too, that they are very dear. And it's an art partnership, something I like to take part in now and then.




nd the bag I knitted last year and have used a lot, but which is very lacy, needed a lining, which it now has as of yesterday, using a chunk of good linen cut from a pair of pants I made over into a divided skirt thing. I have another bag crocheted from twine, which needs a lining too, so the other leg will be used there!




Good old Freecycle found me a taker for a huge bag of good fabric scraps, linen, muslin, handpainted fabric I made, velvet, denim, endless stuff which I know I will not use, having exhausted my fabric ambition for the moment. So somebody else will be very happy about my studio cleaning!

A friend commented recently that she's noticed how explosively creative I've been, and productive, recently, despite all the stress and endless work and responsibility, and I agreed. It seems that the new normal of high stress and physical work has triggered a surge of right brain activity! which when you think about it is not at all surprising.

Art doesn't arise from a comfy affluent life with minimum trouble and stress and worry. In countries as well as in people.

I mean, take Poland. The borders being whipped back and forward between bigger powers for centuries, overrun, invaded, shoved around, bombed, starved, and look at the art that came out of that little population,just loaded with talent: Marie Curie, Paderewski, Chopin, Walesa, come to mind even without looking it up!

And then look at peaceful little Switzerland, neutral in wars, not invaded since, I guess, the Romans crossed swords with the Helvetii, and what has Switzerland to show for it in the art or anywhere other than banking? chocolate, cuckoo clocks and Roger Federer.

I rest my case.

Free spirit: a warped, and unwarped, approach to art

So here's the first tapestry done, and to my amazement, it did not explode when I clipped it off the loom. I tied off warp threads in twos, to one another, removed the stay ties at the sides, and the piece was still a rectangle, yay. It's about 14 inches tall, 10 wide, title: Flower Gardens. I still have to finish off the warp threads to attach them to the back, and decide how to back and mount the piece for hanging.

Intent artists will note references to Van Gogh and to Georgia O'Keefe. No, seriously, the bottom part where the brown and ivory homespun rows are, refers to VG's reed pen drawings of fields, and the top bits with little clouds and blue areas refers to one of O'K's later paintings, a giant one of clouds. But in general, it's an experiment in using all kinds of fibers and learning about their textures, and the technicalities of working with a home made loom without tensioning devices.

Anyway, pic for your enjoyment. Comments invited as always. This is the start of a series and anything I can learn, as a beginning tapestry maker, is welcome.

About reed pens: I used to make these and give them to students in my drawing classes, together with samples of home made walnut ink I'd made, a la Van Gogh, very exciting. I love making art materials, rather than buying factory made items.

Easy to make reed pens: you cut pieces of grapevine (around here it grows wild, easy to find), about ten inches long, (depending on your hand size, mine are big so I need a big pen) make a diagonal cut across each end, so that the pen has two "nibs", one at each end.

Let it season for quite a while -- cut this year to use next year -- then you can dip them in walnut ink for making wonderful brown ink drawings. You don't worry about exactness with this kind of tool, just about expressiveness. Take a look at Van G's early drawings for examples of how he used it -- largely stippling techniques, since the reed pen doesn't hold ink like a regular nib. Great for stubble in fields.

Students of William Blake's Songs of Innocence will remember the Child referring to making a song, etc., and the narrator in taking the advice to write, making a "rural pen." A rural pen is a reed pen. So when you make them, you are in a long line of artists and poets and mystics.

Making walnut ink is another easy one, if a long process. Around here are a lot of wild black walnut trees, and the squirrels obligingly knock down the nuts. They have a green outside layer, a bit like a tennis ball, and the nut is inside, but you don't have to peel or try to crack them or anything difficult like that, in order to make the ink.

Take a great big container, I use the one I make jam and pickles in -- remember that black walnuts are food, no problem with using a kitchen pot for this -- and boil handfuls of them endlessly for days and days until they give up enough dark liquid to work for ink, put in a blurt of vinegar to set the color, pour off the liquid, but filter it several times to get the sediment out of it, and you end up with bottles of walnut ink for painting and drawing, or in fact for dyeing fabric a lovely brown. The Indians used it for a permanent dye, with the accent on permanent.

Do not, definitely do not, set any of the walnuts or liquid down on anything you don't want permanently dark brown. Take a cue from an artist friend who set down a bag of cooked walnuts on the back step when the phone rang, and came back to permanently brown concrete steps. Don't put your hand in the liquid, not harmful, just permanently colorful. But do enjoy making your own ink.

And it's organic, so you might want to keep it in the freezer if you plan on waiting months to use it, otherwise you will have a very interesting mold on top of it and a truly powerful aroma all over your house.....ask me how I know this...I make this ink once every few years, a little going a long way.

I have some in the studio, and I suddenly realize this will be a good dyestuff for the handspun yarn. So my eagerness to share the ink info with you has led to a good idea for me, yay. This is what happens when I teach workshops. I come home with all sorts of great ideas that came up as I was talking. Who says you can't learn anything with your mouth open?

Speaking of tools for spinning: I have hand carders on the way! via a knitting website, I have got hold of two antique carders which are being shipped this week so I can use them for processing my fleece and retire the little animal slicker brushes which are very tiny and take ages to use, though they do work. As usual I'm teaching myself carding, via a couple of YouTube videos, same as I learned to play flute, and use a drop spindle, and understand the spinning wheel and a lot of other stuff.

I read a list of how to simplify your life today and thought, gosh how dumb this is. On the list was: stop watching tv, get off the internet. Most of my current learning is from those two sources! not to mention my many contacts with the outside world. I think it may depend on how you use these tools.

It's not everyone who uses animal slicker brushes to process fleece, though, come to think of it. Or uses picture frames as looms. Or embroidery hoops as papermaking molds, or shaving cream as a base for monotype making.

HP is doing okay these days, wonderful to get out onto the patio in this good weather, not too hot. And amazing how much material for his use has come out of my art studio -- disposable gloves, shaving cream, gauze, cheesecloth, vaseline, to mention only a few. I don't mention to his doctor and nurses where I magically produce this stuff from.....and the sheepskin backrest is cut out and ready to test out tomorrow before I figure out how to fasten it to the chairback. I don't plan on telling anyone it's from a 46 year old coat.

Heck, I have friends younger than that coat. Friends? I have congressmen younger than that coat....

Wild mustard and rescued hostas and small but vital stuff

Pictures today are of wild mustard, which hitched a ride into the garden with some iris I was given, and is outliving the iris nicely, and there are rescued hosta, found tossed away, and brought home, fed, cleaned and happy now. Along with a spathiphyllum, peace lily, on the patio in that nice reading corner, found IN the dumpster years ago, and now happily residing chez Adams, and blooming multiple times every year.

It's not just animals we rescue around here! other dumpster finds, these from yesterday: cut glass bud vase in original box, miniature rocking chair, now housing three miniature dolls of mine, a miniature collection of three! two wonderful unread meditative books about knitting, several very good trivets, trivets being things I need but never get around to acquiring, and a set of stacking canisters, each compartment with the original, sealed teabags, coffee, cocoa, and capuccino. Quite a haul! and now the pressure is on again to shed other things that aren't as useful to us.

Speaking of rescuing, here are a couple of accordion jokes that really should have been left at the dumpster:

Joke One: Welcome to Heaven, here's your harp. Welcome to Hell, here's your accordion.

Joke Two: Man visits friend in fifth floor walkup in New York, leaving accordion in car on the street. Friend says aghast, you never left your accordion in an unlocked car, in THIS neighborhood? Well, yes. Go immediately, lock the car. Visitor hotfoots it down all five flights in a mad rush, runs to the car. Too late. He gazes into the back seat in horror. There on the back seat sits another accordion....

Good ideas afoot as well as terrible jokes. The tapestry is almost finished, and will appear here in due course, complete with areas of my hand prepared and spun yarn, my donated lovely roving spun, and various donated fibers. I'm planning on cutting up an ancient sheepskin coat of HP's to make a sheepskin backrest for his chair and ss legrests, too to save his skin. Always an issue with paralysis, to avoid a lot of pressure on the skin, but sheepskin ought to work.

And I am planning to turn a couple of tshirts HS designed years ago and gave me, and which have been neatly folded on a shelf for ages, into pillows, thereby saving the design, enjoying it and having some use of it. I might use some of my cleaned fleece for stuffing, too.

All this is happening in the ten spare minutes a day I have.

Ending with a question: why is it that when I try to type yarn it comes out first as yearn? is this a Freudian thing or just a typo?

Sheep seem to have got into our lives around here in a big way....

Orchids at camp

I moved a couple of my orchids to pose them against the July sky, to show them off better -- they live in an east facing living room.

They're great plants -- I give them very little care, other than making sure there's humidity from a pebble tray under them in their normal home, and not letting them touch the window, and that's about it, other than staking up the stem. These along with several others currently dormant, were given to me via Freecycle from a collector who was getting out of orchids now that he had two rambunctious little boys to contend with, and they've adapted fine over the last year to my amateurish handling.

Once they start blooming they go for months. The one that lived in Andy's hospital room is dormant now but bloomed for nearly four months, very cheering.

So here they are, pretending to be at camp! and making me look like a good gardener..

Happy Fourth on the Fifth

The Fourth was a great celebration around here: the family reunion party next door,held on the third, overflowed and HP though he was in bed, was included, plates of food sent in, good wishes sent in with them.

Then the second day of the Fourth, neighbor visits, lunch visit from HS to help HP with various tasks, then assist us both to eat the usual Fourth food -- hot dogs, with everything, buddhist style (!) including mustard pickles, relish, ketchup, home made potato salad, donated watermelon and wine and fake beer by neighbors , departure of HS to the shore, then viewing of Foyle in the evening just over in time to watch fireworks on tv, the nearest we get these days....all in all, a very good Fourth was had by all.

Including the two native Americans I show you here, seen on the Fourth doing what they always do on the Fourth and every other day -- foraging! one a chipmunk looking anxiously in case I planned to compete for the goodies in his dish,



the other a rabbit posing patiently until I got organized before vanishing into the shrubs.



So Happy Fourth, since it's still the weekend of the Day, in fact it's the third of the Fourth.... to one and all and if where you live it's just the fourth, an ordinary Saturday, still, it's a gift, enjoy!

Stitching and clicking and Angela sightings

Thanks for the minor flood of happy emails as well as the response in here, folks! the Lizzies have now swept the stage clean, given all the bouquets to local hospitals, folded up the velvet drapes and are taking a hiatus until next year.....





Meanwhile, I used a few minutes to do something I've been meaning to do for ages -- renovate an old pair of jeans, which for months have been way too big, partly because they stretched, partly because I shrank, what with one thing and another.

So I cut them off, used the body part as a bag, and the legs to make a long shoulder strap, and I now have a nice tote or workbag or catchall, as the case may be. Only stitching was when I attached the strap at each end, otherwise I used that fusible web stuff, much faster, and since I have no machine, a lot easier than pushing a needle through denim. So here it is, unveiled.

And outside the daylilies are bustin out all over, in our garden, which you see out front, on the patio out back, and various other places including the dumpster area which now looks a lot better! thought you'd like to see. Also the upside down tomato at the front door, doesn't seem to mind being upside down at all, fruiting busily.




Around here, nothing to do with daylilies, but a lot to do with my new computer, this tangent: we have what's known as Angela Sightings. There's a woman who lives a few miles from here, shops where I do, knows a lot of people I know, and looks exactly like me, even sounds like me.

For years we have been mistaken for one another, and we once met at the supermarket when the checker asked if we were sisters shopping together, and fell down laughing when we realized we'd met Her, that other person we were always been mistaken for. And we both said we'd been friendly to people even if we had no idea who they were, so that the other person wouldn't get a rep. for being standoffish!

The only thing was that I was hoping I'd look a bit more like Cindy Crawford, rather than a nice clean looking lady....

Anyway, yesterday, fooling about with the new computer, and installing my scanner software, I had to go to the video/scanner function, and noticed on that screen a puzzled looking old lady, with curly grey hair, looking as if she was a bit unsure of herself.

I thought, how clever to put that there in this function, exactly how I feel at this moment, I wonder if they're marketing to the older group. Then I realized the face was moving as I talked to myself.

And FINALLY realized that this computer has a camera, and that I'd opened it in the course of installing the scanner, and that puzzled old lady was ME! which explains why I wouldn't have realized Angela was like me, since I failed totally to recognize my own personal self. Duh.