COLD TOES, HOT COFFEE

If my feet are cold, I can't fall asleep. In winter, my feet almost always feel frigid after only a few minutes in bed.

My attempts to solve this problem have been many.  

When I get up, I place a pair of heavy socks on the bathroom radiator so they are toasty warm when I am ready for bed. I slide my slippers under the radiator so the tops are warm, too.  But that seems to keep my feet warm for only a few minutes after removing the slippers and crawling into bed.

My next strategy is to fold a flannel sheet to approximately 6 ft. X 3 ft. and drape it on the bedroom radiator. When I go to bed, I fold it once more and place it under the covers at the bottom of the bed, then place my feet between the folds. This keeps my feet warmer longer than the heated socks by themselves, but not by much.

A few weeks ago, I searched the internet for "foot warmers."  I found several different ones and finally purchased Bed Buddy Soothing Foot Warmers on eBay. (Later, I found them for about half the price on amazon.com.)  They are fleece booties with long, oval bean-bag-like inserts. It is recommended to  place the inserts in the microwave for no more than one minute ---although I heat them for two ---then place them in pouches under the soles of the booties.

After heating them, I scurry upstairs and place them on the radiator under the flannel sheet while changing into PJs. I grab them right before I jump into bed and quickly put them on before inserting my feet between the folds of the flannel sheet.  They heat the bottom of my feet, but if my toes are cold, I have to maneuver my feet so that the bottom of my left foot is on top of my cold right toes, for example.  They seem to stay warm for quite a while, at least until I fall asleep, which sometimes takes 30 to 45 minutes.

One can't walk with the inserts in the booties.  I don't want to walk on my dusty floors and then crawl into bed, so this is not a problem.  If I get up several hours later to go to the bathroom, my feet are plenty warm, so I remove the booties and drop them at the top of the steps so I remember to take them downstairs to store near the microwave.

The biggest problem is that the booties come in only one size. I have large feet for a woman ---size 10. Yet the booties are so loose that they often come off during the night ---but usually after I've fallen asleep  when my feet are already warm. The product could be improved with velcro closures or, perhaps, by manufacturing them in varied size ranges.

After retiring from teaching, I took a position as a customer service representative, where I worked nights. Even though I RE-retired months ago, I am still in my night mode.  Many days, my husband is up before I hit the sack.

So last week one day, he was in the kitchen eating his breakfast while I was completing computer work in the next room.  When I was ready to head toward bed, I grabbed my foot warming inserts, placed them on the paper plate I use to warm them, opened the microwave, shoved the plate inside without even looking, and hit the mug my husband had placed there, spilling coffee on my foot warming inserts, the paper plate and the inside of the microwave.

After cleaning my mess, I placed the warming inserts on the kitchen radiator to dry, so my feet remained cold when I went to bed that day.

The blurb on the label for my foot warmers explains that they are scented with "eucalyptus (to revitalyze), clove (to comfort), and cinnamon (to calm)."  I actually don't find the scent soothing, but once my feet are under the covers, I can't smell the herbs. I am hoping the scent will eventually go away.

Now, when I heat them, my foot warmers are scented with eucalyptus, cloves, cinnamon, and COFFEE ---definitely NOT an improvement.

Maybe the label should read "eucalyptus (to revitalyze), clove (to comfort), cinnamon (to calm), and coffee (to stimulate your heart, respiratory system and central nervous system)" ---not something I really need when I'm attempting to fall asleep.

GRANDMA & AUNT MILLIE

     I've been using Photoshop for more than 20 years now, but I am mostly self-taught. The program is so vast that I doubt that anyone, even the creators, know every single thing that can be done with the program.
     In 1999 I had taken a class in digital photo retouching using Photoshop. It was being offered free at a huge photo studio, with the goal of finding about 10 people they could hire to retouch digital photos, mostly portraits. I passed the course, as did several others in the class, but for some unknown reason, the studio went out of business within a few weeks, so no one was ever hired.

     My local community college allows senior citizens to take credited classes for free, as long as the class is not filled. One can audit the course or take it for credit. I always take classes for credit. I'm not attempting to earn another degree, but I know I will put more effort into the class if I will be graded, and therefore, I will get more out of it. 

     Last spring I took a class in Adobe Illustrator. About ten years ago, I had purchased an older version of the program on eBay, but it is so different from Photoshop that I never quite figured out how to use it.  

     This semester, I'm taking Photoshop with an updated version of the program. I already knew a lot, but I am learning new tricks all the time.

     One recent class project was to find an old, damaged photo to retouch. 

     Above you will see a photo of my grandmother Selma and her sister, my great-aunt Millie. (Click photo for a larger view.) I am guessing this photo was taken around around 1898.

     This is what my mother told me about my grandmother and her family:

     Both of my mother's grandparents were of German decent. I'm not sure if they had been born in Germany or in the U.S. They lived in Spring Garden, a residential section on the North Side area of Pittsburgh.

     My grandmother's mother, my great-grandmother, died in childbirth when Millie was born. As an adult, Millie married and had two daughters. My mother says she was often depressed or "disturbed" and would often leave her husband and live with her sister's family for a few days or weeks. When my mother died, one of Millie's daughters asked if I had any family photos with Aunt Millie in them. Apparently on one particularly disturbed day, Millie had burned all of her family photos.

     Not long after his wife died, my great-grandfather remarried. His second wife had a son. I think his name was Frederick, but he had a great tenor voice, so, as an adult, everyone called him Tenor. He was very tall, about 6'7". When he died, a special coffin had to be built for him.

     One day when Tenor was a toddler, his mother asked a neighbor to watch her son. She left and never returned.  

     My grandmother Selma helped to raise her sister and brother and did much of the housework for my great-grandfather. When she was about 12, her father took her out of school and sent her to work. She usually had live-in jobs taking care of children. For a while she worked for people who lived above their small grocery store. She cared for the children and did housework. Later she worked at a boarding house, helping with cooking, cleaning and laundry.

     Sunday was usually Selma's day off. She would walk several miles to her father's home so she wouldn't have to spend money on a streetcar fare. As soon as she arrived, her father would hold out his hand for her meager wages. After a while, she stopped going home so she could save what she earned to replace her worn and too-small winter coat.

     In her teens, she met William, an immigrant from Sweden, at the boarding house where she worked. The woman who owned the boarding house helped Selma and William elope in 1908. My grandmother was only 16. William was in his 20s. They took a train from Pittsburgh to Jamestown, New York to be married. William worked for American Bridge. I'm not exactly sure what he did, but he might have been a supervisor. My mother said he was often called out at all hours to resolve problems.

     They had four daughters, Selma (called Sis), my mother Grace, Elsie, and Jeanne, and remained happily married until my grandfather died of pneumonia in the 1940s. That was during WWII. Apparently he might have been saved with penicillin, but all of that medication had been directed toward the military. He was in his 50s when he died. My grandmother Selma took on part-time jobs for many years. She often cared for sick or disabled people in their homes. For a while she lived and worked at what we then referred to an an "old folks' home." In her later years she lived with my parents. Her daughters provided her with 13 grandchildren, nine boys and 4 girls. In her late 60's she suffered from Alzheimer's and had a stroke. She died in her early 70's in 1965.
     My mother was the second oldest daughter and the last surviving sister. She died in 2009 at the age of 95.

     Below find one of my class projects, the retouching and spot coloring of the above photo. I will be passing these photos, the original and several versions of the retouch, to Millie's daughters.

     (Click on images for larger views.)

     

TWO COLORS

"YELLOW AND GREEN 2"

(click on image for larger view)

A new challenge on Monday Artday is "TWO COLORS"

Click on the link to see how other artists interpreted this and other artistic challenges.

"Where flowers bloom so does hope."

                                     ---  Lady Bird Johnson

GUILTY PLEASURE #3: THE CRAZIES (1973)

A remake of George Romero's "The Crazies" came out in February of this year. I read a few reviews, mostly ho-hum, but I haven't seen it.  It takes place in a small Iowa town where something in the water is making the residents go crazy.  Neighbors are killing neighbors in rather unique ways.


Go back in time 27 years to 1973's original version in which the military accidentally drops a chemical weapon on the town. It certainly had political overtones of the day, yet it was a very low-budget film. 


It was lame, really lame.  

Yet, I loved the original version because the people going crazy in "The Crazies" were neighbors ---I mean they were my real neighbors, for I live in the town where it was filmed and many of the townspeople in the film were played by locals. George Romero must love this town, because he made his original "Night of the Living Dead" in this area, too.


"The Crazies" (1973) was so bad, it was good. The newer version apparently has slicker special effects that, in my opinion, usually don't make a movie any better, only take away from its charm.

BEWARE OF THE BLOB!

        A few weeks ago my husband and I were working in our vegetable garden when our neighbor urgently called us over to the edge of our yard. She was concerned because in the mulch between some evergreens we had recently planted, there was a large, slimey, bright-yellow mass on the mulch.
        “What is that?” she asked.
        We had no idea, but I said it looked like an animal might have thrown up there. But on further inspection, I decided the color and texture were too uniform and the yellow too bright.

        My husband kept an eye on it. The next day it turned a peachy color and later changed into a brown dust.
        When we did a search on the internet, we learned it is a mold called Fuligo septica, but because of it’s appearance, it is commonly called “dog vomit slime mold.” Nice name, huh?
        Anyway, it is harmless. In fact, some related molds in Mexico are gathered, cooked, and eaten much like scrambled eggs. It usually develops on mulch or on rotting materials such as dead trees or fallen leaves. And it almost always develops after a period of unusually wet weather.


        The other interesting thing about this slime mold is that it inspired the 1958 film “The Blob!” starring Steve McQueen. So, of course, we ordered “The Blob!” from Netflix. I had never seen the entire film before, just the highlights, including the famous scene of a crowd frantically running from the Colonial Theater. For a low-budget, sci-fi B-movie, it wasn’t bad.
        "The Blob!" in the film was an amoeba-like creature that arrived from outerspace and spent the rest of the film devouring people. It was immune from gunfire and high-voltage electricity.

The Blob theme song:

Beware of The Blob!

Beware of The Blob!

It creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides,

Across the floor, right through the door

And all around the wall.

A splotch, a blotch,

Be careful of The Blob!

         Although credited to The Five Blobs, the song was performed by Bernie Nee and overdubbed to make him sound like a group. It was written to a Latin beat by the songwriting duo of Burt Bacharach and Mack David. 

        The song was released as a single in 1958 and, ridiculous and annoying as it was, it became a top-40 hit nationwide, making it one of Bacharach's earliest hits.

Blob trivia:

Steve McQueen was offered $2,500 or 10% of the profits. He took the $2,500 because he didn't expect the film to be a box-office success. It grossed over 4 million dollars.

The producers originally signed Steve McQueen to a three-film deal. McQueen was so difficult to work with during filming that he was released from his contract for the other two films. (My husband, a film buff, has read accounts of Steve’s constant whining on other film projects.)

In "The Blob!" the movie being shown at the Colonial Theatre was “Daughter of Horror,” originally released as “Dementia .” The movie was silent, so Ed McMahon was added as a narrator wearing a stocking over his head and walking through a cemetery as he spoke. Johnny Carson surprised McMahon on “The Tonight Show” one night with a clip from the edited film.

Most of the movie was filmed in Phoenixville, PA. The crew had worked on only educational films previously.

The Blob itself was created with a modified weather balloon in the early shots and, in the later shots, with colored silicone gel which was actually fairly firm. The crew used hot lights to make it more pliable.

Even though real slime mold (from which The Blob was inspired) starts out as bright yellow, in the film The Blob was a clear gel-like substance until it started to consume people, afterwhich it turned red.

In Phoenixville, the Colonial Theater still exists and hosts an annual Blobfest every July including a reenactment of the crowd exiting the theater.

-----
One additional note: I don't want to give away the end for those who have not seen the film, but because of certain environmental conditions in the world today, The Blob! just might be a threat again. So, BEWARE!

Sources:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/trivia
http://theblobsite.filmbuffonline.com/index2.htm