Before-n-after

I know from experience with my own family that treasured family photos are hard for some people to part with, even if the person requesting them only needs to make a digital copy. (I'm still in my, oh, fifteenth year of waiting patiently for some additional Rice family photos, but who's counting? *grin*)

Sometimes, I feel a little sheepish asking if I can make copies, especially if I'm only a relative by marriage.

So what's a girl to do?

Use her camera!

The LeMar cousins had many photos on display yesterday at the family reunion. It was a dizzying array to a self-appointed family archivist like myself. So instead of fussing over the logistics of making hard copies, I just took pictures of the pictures.

Now, this works well in some circumstances, not so much in others. But it certainly doesn't hurt to try.


This handsome devil is Joel's uncle, Cliff LeMar. The photo on the left is the raw image, straight from my camera. The photo was hanging on a corkboard inside the shelter at Grandview Park. I only took one shot. Multiple shots are preferable.

Photoshop to the rescue! I started with a Levels adjustment layer. I fuss with this sometimes, but I just opted to go with the Auto adjustment. Then I used the Warp tool to pull in the sides a bit and give dear Cliff better posture. The photo had been trimmed to fit in an oval frame, so I begged, borrowed and stole from around the portrait to fill in the corners. Basically, I used the Lasso tool with a good feather of 3px to copy a good section, then I moved the patch over the blank area and blended it with a layer mask and a soft brush. I also needed the Clone Stamp tool and the Patch tool to aid with the blending here and there.

The tricky part was filling in the cut-away parts of Cliff's suit. I used the same process as above, but I was much more particular in lining up textures and shadows.

The before photo has an obvious yellow cast to it, and the Auto Levels adjustment layer took care of much of it. But I used another Levels adjustment layer, using Cliff's shirt, which was presumably white in real life, to sample with the White eyedropper and jazz up the rest of the colors. I merged all of the layers I'd created so far into a new layer, and I performed a Variations adjustment on this new layer, making it a teensy bit more blue.

Et voila! A "copy"! Sure, a bit more effort than had I just asked if I could run them safely over to the westside, scan, and run them back. But this way everyone feels safe.

I have a few more to Photoshop, and now I can share copies with all of the LeMar cousins.

Now for those Rice relatives...

Socks

I was putting away some laundry the other day, and as I was making room in Joel's sock drawer I put my hand on the socks. The first pair of grown-up's socks that I'd ever knitted with my own ten fingers.

Joel's never worn them. It's not a critique of my knitting skills, it's just that they're wool. Soft-ish sock alpaca/silk, a beautiful taupe skein from a bonafide yarn store in Plano, but wool nonetheless. Slightly itchy. No Gold Toe. But Joel keeps them because I made them. He's a bit of a sucker like that, even though he's all tough and manly on the outside.

Regardless of the lack of action they get from his feet, those socks are beautiful. I took them out of Joel's drawer and unfolded them. I marvelled at the idea that the tangle of stitches, increases, decreases, heel flaps, and Kitchener stitch all came from uncoordinated me and a fistful of double-pointed needles.

As usual, some other random thought strikes as I'm folding the socks back together.

"He" asked me to knit a pair of socks for him once. "He" being my high school sweetheart, the boy I just knew (at the wise old age of seventeen) that I would marry someday. I used to fantasize about signing our checks and Christmas cards with my first name and his last name.

Yes, it was true love indeed.

(And I rarely write checks anymore and barely issue Christmas cards, so that really was some fantasy.)

I had never knitted a thing in my life at seventeen. I tried to crochet a sweater once out of a book from the library. I scored a couple of skeins of squeaky white Wintuk from Shopko and forced myself to decipher the pattern into wearable art.

Three weeks later, and I'd barely gotten beyond the foundation chain.

When I was little, my dear neighbor, Hope Harbeck, latched on to my interest in anything crafty. She made it her mission to pass on the feminine arts that her own grown daughter had never given a passing glance. I used to follow her husband, Orville, around their garden. I liked digging up the carrots, which of course he let me wash and eat right there. But after all of that dirty work and vegetable consumption, Hope would wrangle me to sit with her while she tried to help me grasp the concept of casting on.

When "he" asked me to knit socks for him, I took on the assignment with the fervor only a lovestruck adolescent could possess. I ran like a bullet train to Northwest Fabrics and bought a skein of the "good stuff", something like 20% wool.

I was out an entire $3.95, but like I said, this was true love.

I knew that I needed more than two needles to accomplish this sock knitting thing. I settled on a pattern (an old one from Hope, if I remember, complete with cables) and I cast on all of the stitches required for the first row onto one of the slippery Size 5 double-points. The pattern instructed me to divide these stitches onto four needles, being careful not to twist the stitches. All I could do was twist the stitches. I unraveled the cast-on stitches and tried again. And again. And again. I kept trying until the yarn was so over-cast-on that it lay limp and frazzled in my hands.

I gave up.

He was not meant to be with me. The socks were not meant for him.

They were meant for Joel.

For some reason, the next time I attempted to knit socks, I understood the pattern. It was like looking at that optical illusion where you can see two faces or a vase, and this time I saw the two faces instead of the vase or the vase instead of the two faces. Sure, I made a few mistakes, but it didn't seem like reading Chinese upside-down like it had so many years ago. I knit a fine pair of socks, worthy of my soul mate's feet.

To everything there is a season. Socks included.

Betsy Wetsy

My son, Ben, is the proud owner of his very own...

BETSY WETSY.

Ben is now three-and-a-half years old, and he is extremely resistant to toilet training.

Of course, Elizabeth was potty-trained at two, with very little effort on our part. We pointed to the toilet. She went. Done deal. Never made it past Size 3 Pampers.

Sam was a bit more difficult, but very determined. I vividly remember him coming down with a vicious case of the flu that left him dehydrated to the point that we wound up in the hospital on an IV. He was wearing Pull-Ups, but he asked me if he could go potty. I told him he could just use his Pull-Ups this one time because he was so sick. But he insisted on walking down the hall to the restroom. There he was, my little man, shuffling through the ER wheeling his IV stand all the way to the toilet. It was an heroic thing to witness.

Sam's threshold? Size 5. Barely broke into the box, but we had crossed the line.

Ben? Size 6 and counting. I even went all Mommie Dearest and switched from Pampers to Huggies, assuming that Pampers were far too absorbent and therefore too comfortable for Mr. LeMar. After Size 6, our only other option will be Depends. I have nightmares that I will have to sneak Ben into preschool, sliding under the radar of the no-underwear-no-shoes-no-service preschool standard, only to be turned away after he soils his adult incontinence undergarments and rats himself out.

True story. We stopped at a rest area on our way home from Sioux City before Ben was born, and I witnessed a frustrated mother changing her SEVEN-YEAR-OLD son in the restroom. She was trying to reason with him. If you are having an existential battle with your child regarding diapers, it's gone too far.

Ben is *this close* to "too far". We introduced the concept as soon as Ben expressed interest, just like parents are supposed to do. But I have this feeling that as the baby he knows he's getting exclusive time with Mom and Dad because we have to change his diapers. Trouble is, the older he gets, the more the deposits evolve. Without getting into too much detail, the days of "sweet-smelling" breastfed-baby jobbies are long, long, long gone.

(And whomever decreed breastfed babies have sweet-smelling diapers must have been smoking something sweet when they wrote that. Comparatively? Maybe. But there's nothing sweet about Numero Dos. Ever.)

We've rewarded Ben by trucking the entire family to Dairy Queen when Ben merely sits on the potty. He doesn't even have to do anything but sit, and he earns ice cream. The promises have become grander and grander, if only Ben would actually put something in the potty.

I think we're up to a supermodel girlfriend and a Lexus at this point. Honestly, I've lost track.

So a co-worker of Joel's leads Joel to (of all places) DrPhil.com. Dr. Phil professes a fool-proof method of toilet training that he swears will work on the most resistant of subjects in a single day. Buy a doll that wets. Load up the doll with bottled water. Let the subject put the doll on the potty. And celebrate profusely when the doll performs as requested.

Dr. Phil promises that Ben will want his own "Potty Party" so badly that he will fling his diapers to the margins for all eternity.

We had to run to Wal-Mart this afternoon to fill in the missing blanks on our school supplies lists, so we checked out the toy aisle and found such a doll. She's a girl, and Ben has christened her "Lily".

(As a side note, Wal-Mart had two versions of the same doll on the shelf. One had pursed lips and seemed entirely too grumpy, the other had a pleasant smile on her face. Ben chose the "happy baby".)

Lily is now sitting on our kitchen counter, waiting for her training to start tomorrow morning. Believe it or not, Ben is JAZZED about taking care of Lily and teaching her how to go potty.

Dr. Phil? If this fails, I have you down for a Costco-sized box of Huggies, Size 6, possibly a pallet of Depends. I've never been one to put faith in you before. I'm calling on you now.

Dude, I'm at my wits' end. This better work.

New technology, old wounds

Me at my dorkiest, 1985

I spent six years at the same elementary school with all of the same kids. I was by no means popular, but I wasn't a total outcast, either. Then 7th grade rolled around, and I was at a junior high school in a completely different neighborhood with some of the same kids from elementary, but with a lot new kids who really didn't like me very much.

I don't remember if I was just an easy target (most likely) or if I antagonized the Mean Kids (maybe?), but I do remember some awfully painful teasing during those two years at Herbert Hoover.

In particular, I remember one day quite clearly. I was walking down the hallway in between classes (awkwardly, as usual), and I heard her voice behind me, mocking me.

"Wow. Nice outfit. Your Mom took you to K-Mart yesterday, huh?"

(Actually, Sears, I thought, but thank you so very much for noticing my Toughskins.)

Then her voice was right behind me, still saying mean things, still trying to get a reaction. I walked a little faster. She did, too. Next thing I knew, I felt her foot in between my feet, and I felt my books fly out of my hands and my glasses flip off of my face right before my head hit the hallway floor. She laughed even harder, stepped over me, and walked away with her giggling friends.

I felt like an absolute worthless piece of garbage, and I suppose that was her intention.

I don't know if she treated everyone like that, or if I was special. I just know that when I think about it now, more than twenty years later, I still get a sickening feeling in my gut.

The other day, her name popped up as a "Suggested Friend" on Facebook.

Curse you, Facebook! If you only knew! Why don't you get your smart people on the case and program some sort of "Bully Filter"! And, oh, gee, THANKS for dredging up one of the worst memories of my adolescence.

This minor Facebook incident reminded me of a time when I thought I'd gotten the upper hand on her, too. Joel and I were in Sioux City, shortly after we were engaged. We went to a restaurant downtown. SHE showed us to our table. She SERVED us. It felt GLORIOUS! I felt so smug and so superior that I actually acted like a jerk towards her. I knew she recognized me because she wouldn't look me in the eye. She seemed sort of embarrassed to be in a position of servitude towards the dorky high school nothing.

We went to high school together, too, so I could have been friendly and shot the breeze with her about what she'd been doing since then. But I didn't. I gloated.

When Joel and I went back to my parents' house, I relayed the story of my bully's comeuppance to them as if I was relaying the story of how I'd won a freakin' Olympic gold medal.

"Oh, she went to college and was in such-and-such city doing such-and-such, and then she had to come home," my Mom tells me. (Sioux City is essentially a small town, and everybody knows everybody else's business.)

"Oh, REALLY?! What a loser, having to come back home. She thought she was really big time, and now look at her! She's a hostess in a restaurant in Sioux City!" I mocked.

"Jennie, she didn't have to come home because she couldn't make it. She had to come home for a very good reason," Mom scolded.

And it was a very good reason. And this time I was the jerk. Big time.

I felt like going back to the restaurant and apologizing. But by then I was hoping that she still felt I was the little nobody she tortured in school and she still believed she had me in my place. I knew, though, that I was the only one keeping score.

I spent so much time in my own head during junior high and high school, yearning for the day when I would blossom like Mom had always promised. When I wouldn't have to deal with Mean Girls at school and when I would realize I wasn't really a loser. I fantasized about my Dad being transferred to the opposite side of the country so I could start over where nobody knew I was a dork, where I could reinvent myself and live happily ever after.

That was a waste of time. I would have made better use of my time forgiving and letting go. I probably should have prayed harder during Mass, not so much for relief from my tormentor but for her relief. Turns out her life wasn't easy, and that's probably why she let loose on me.

Forgive and forget.