Living "La Vida Loco"

There are days when I really enjoy my life.....my INNER life, that is.  A typical day for me might start with a shower before I head downstairs to blow-dry my hair.  Gah!  Suddenly, I'm launching myself across the room, firing a shot from my blaster at the alien bad guys who are trying to keep me from getting to my spacecraft.  I dive into a somersault, dodging several shots and knocking two pursuers out of commission, spring to my feet,  let loose with several more blasts that take out the rest of my pursuers before I vault over a cart in my path and run up the gangplank into my ship.  And THAT'S before breakfast!

I should probably do dishes before heading off for my physical therapy.  WAIT!  Something doesn't feel right.  Stand back, everyone.  Nobody move until I've had a chance to check out the area.  If I'm not back in five minutes, go out the back window and find a phone to call for NCIS backup.  Tell them to make sure Special Agent Gibbs is sent out here because Field Agent Porterfield is in a potential hostage situation and might need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when rescued.

Trained to lure adversaries into a false sense of superiority by making them think I am just a middle-aged, out-of-shape woman, I easily slip into my awesome ninja skills.  Hiyah!  Take that, vermin!

 But wait!  These aren't ordinary attackers.  They're vampires.  With a flick of my wrists, I draw on my otherworldly powers and the books on my shelves start flying off and hitting them left and right.  They're begging for mercy by the time my shelves are unloaded but it ain't going to happen.  I've dealt with their kind before.

"Never mess with a librarian," I sneer as I stake them through their hearts and turn them to ash.

Time to put on my shades and head over for PT.  I'm one of the few folks who know the truth about that establishment.  It might look like it's full of therapists and gimps but it's all a clever cover.  The whole place is a hotbed of political intrigue.  I park my car and uncoil myself from behind the wheel.  As I stride across the parking lot, I have to remind myself halfway to the door to mask my lethalness behind my bumbling cover.  My therapist starts me off with six minutes on the arm bike.  My steely gaze might look like it is locked on the minutes counting down but I'm watching everything around me.  Nothing is escaping my notice and it will all be in my report to MI-5 when my session is over.  Of course, that might have to wait while I grab a DQ Blizzard on my way back to the Safe House.

You know, sometimes I'm not sure why I bother to watch television.  I have enough going on in my own mind to keep myself entertained for months.  Time to head down the rabbit hole.  Over and Out!

In a Parallel Universe Fog

One of my favorite shows is "Dr. Who."  I love the idea of being able to pop back and forth in time...to have that freedom to be able to go wherever whimsy (and the Doctor) want to take me.  Truth be told though, I probably don't even need a time lord to find myself wandering through universes and time.  As a writer, I find myself constantly existing on two different planes of existence.   There is the "Reality Universe" where most of my fellow travelers reside and then there is the "Dee Universe" where I am usually in the midst of creating a story in my mind OR caught up as an actor in an adventure or scenario.  I suspect I'm not alone in this and that many other creative people do the same.

It DOES have its drawbacks, though.  I tend to lose track of time.  I get so caught up in what's going on in my creative endeavors that I am often amazed to discover, at some point, that I'm still back in south-central Pennsylvania and it is past time to start supper.  I can even be having a conversation with you (well, it might LOOK like I'm having a conversation with you) and yet mentally be off doing battle with the Fey or looking for clues in a Gothic mansion or on an archaeological dig in Egypt in the late 1800's.  Sometimes I discover, to my horror, that I've agreed to do something or go somewhere and I don't have a clue what we were talking about.  Dang!

This week, I was excited to prepare for a 3-day scrapbooking retreat coming up on the weekend.  I had gathered all of my scrapbooking supplies and packed them into my carrier.  I unhooked my laptop and had that packed away and ready to go.  My suitcase was in the car.

Thursday evening I baked four dozen cookies to take with me.  Everyone who attends this retreat always brings some type of snack so that we have plenty of goodies to nosh on when we're working into the wee hours of the night/morning.

I packed up the car and set off Friday afternoon for the retreat.  I was supposed to be meeting up with my daughter at the hotel where the retreat would be held.  While I was driving down there, I decided to stop at a grocery store and pick up a few more items to snack on.  In a rare moment of generosity (clarity?), I decided to call Laura to see if she wanted me to pick up anything for her.

"Hi, Honey.  I'm on my way.  Do you want me to pick up anything for you?" I asked.

"Why," she asked.

"For the retreat," I answered.

"Oh, my gosh," she gasped.  "That's not THIS weekend, is it?  I thought it was NEXT weekend.  It better not be this weekend.  I don't have any of my pictures ready or anything."

"Uh.....let me check my email and I'll call you right back," I replied.

I checked through my old emails and sure enough, I was a week early.  Oh, for Pete's sake.  If I hadn't called my daughter, I would have driven 45 minutes down the road to the hotel and waltzed into the lobby with my bags, looking like an idiot.  I called her back and we had a good laugh.

I decided to swing by Wendy's and get some pop for the drive back to the house.  I ordered my cola, drove up to the pick-up window, and paid the attendant.  The young man took my money, handed me my drink, and shut the window.  Ummm, where was the straw?  I waved at the fellow.  He looked at me and finally opened the window.

"Where is the straw," I asked him.

"It will be in the bag," he answered, and he shut the window.

I waved at him and he looked at me again.  Finally he opened the window.

"I didn't order any food," I explained.

"Whoops, sorry about that," he said, as he handed me a straw.  He shut the window.

I waved at him again.  He looked at me and opened the window.

"How much was the drink?," I asked him.

"$1.90," he told me.

"I gave you $2.00," I said.

"Oh, for goodness sakes," he laughed.  "I'd better get my head in gear."  He handed me my change and shut the window.

This time I drove away.  It felt good to know that someone else was not quite "with it" either.  I wasn't going to tell him, though, that I had skipped ahead a whole week.  Let's just keep that between you and me, shall we?

Pardon Me While I Locate My Brain

"No, no....you DON'T want to keep going!"

Something happened on my way to visit my mom in the nursing home.  I went one way and I think my brain decided to go a separate way.  You see, I was driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike just one stop over from my town.  It should have taken me about 20 minutes.  Well, you know how your brain kind of goes on automatic pilot when you're driving sometimes?  Maybe that's what happened.

"Maybe I need one of these smart cars to tell me what to do."

As I approached the exit, I noticed police cars set up at the exit ramp with flashing lights, a long line of cars and trucks sitting on the ramp and lined up all the way through the exit terminals and down to the road I wanted to go on, and a temporary electronic sign set up by the exit saying "Caution...accident.  Expect long stops."

"No problem," I thought.  "I'll just go on to the next exit and get off there and take the back roads over to the nursing home.  That way I'll avoid getting stuck in this jam."

So I sailed right past the exit and got about 200 or 300 yards past it when I suddenly realized......oh, no......I'm on the Turnpike, not Interstate 81.  The next exit isn't one mile down the road.  It's 22 miles down the road.  It's like being in a cattle chute.  You can't just turn around and head back.  You have to stay the course and keep on going until you reach the next official exit before you can loop around.  It wouldn't have been so bad except that it was a gray, rainy day, most of the leaves have already fallen off the trees, there was a mist hanging around so that there wasn't even much of a view to see, and I had lots to do at home.

I called the Commander to get some sympathy.  "Hey, it could be worse," he said.  About 10 minutes later, he called me back.  "Where are you?" he asked.

"I'm heading back now.  I finally made it to the next exit," I replied.

"Oh, too bad," he answered.  "I was just thinking that you might want to take Route 11 back when you get off the Turnpike because the exit you want will probably still be blocked."

He was right, of course, but it was too late to do anything about it.  I did the logical thing.  I sailed past the exit I wanted AGAIN and just headed on home.  I'll try again tomorrow.

"Hey, brain....where in the world are you?"

Guess my brain was lost in space today.  Thankfully Mom wasn't expecting me so she wasn't disappointed.  Luckily, I had gassed up the car the other day, too, because my tank had been rather low.  Let's hope I can figure out what road I'm on by tomorrow.  Oy!

FIVE Alter Egos on a Friday

I'm a tad late today with my Friday's Fave Five.  I guess I could claim the excuse that there has been a change in pressure in the weather and I've been flirting with a migraine all day long.  In an effort to avoid the dreaded "aura" starting, I've been trying to avoid looking at a bright computer screen as much as possible but since we are in the late afternoon, I'm going to try and chance it and see what happens.  I thought today that, instead of writing about 5 highlights to my week, I'd share with you five "alter egos" that I've known and loved growing up.  Keep in mind that I grew up in a reading family, surrounded by books so I had a very wide group of characters to latch onto.

1.  Peter Pan/Wendy - Well technically, that's two but it's hard to separate one from the other in my mind.  I could probably sing the lyrics to the songs from the musical "Peter Pan" by the time I was in early Elementary school.  I LOVED listening to that LP record and Mary Martin's wonderful voice.  Of course, at that age, the imp on the cover of the album WAS Peter Pan in my mind.  I decided that surely I must be Wendy or at least one of the Lost Boys, if not Peter himself.  I could crow with the best of them and I sure didn't want to grow up anytime soon.  And I often left my window unlatched on summer evenings so that I could fly off to Never Never Land, should the opportunity present itself.

 2.  National Velvet - When Peter failed to materialize on my window sill, I grew older and decided that I was destined to win the Grand National Steeplechase.  I cut out horses from magazines and pasted them to cardboard and then made little thread bridles for them.  I ran around the house, "jumping" the downspouts as I imagined myself guiding my horse over the jumps at Aintree.  I wrote away for AND received (bless their kind souls) an entry form from that venerable old racecourse to enter a horse in the Grand National.  Eventually I did own a horse or two but none of them were jumpers and I had to be content with watching young Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney in the movie again and again.

3.  Hawkeye - By the time I was in late junior high school, I had decided that I was destined to be a modern-day Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans.  I could imagine myself gliding through the forest, long rifle in hand.  In fact, I practiced walking as noiselessly as I could through the woods whenever I had the chance.  I could see myself sticking my head in the doorway of a sod cabin, assuring the folks within that all was well because I, Hawkeye, was keeping watch outside.  I took to wearing beaded Native American jewelry and moccasins which went over about as well as you would imagine in southern Michigan.  I was just ahead of the times.  Five years later, I would have been right in style amongst the Hippies.

4.  Scottish Highlander - I outgrew horses and realized that I didn't much care for scrounging around in the woods because of the bugs but these last two alter egos have stood me in good stead right up to the present time.  The highlander was particularly helpful when I was going through chemotherapy for cancer.  My oncologist suggested that I visualize the drugs going through my body and "killing" cancer cells.  I took it a step further.  I enlisted the aid of my inner Highlander.  Each day he'd grab his claymore in both hands and run around inside my body gleefully slaying cancer cells left and right.  I can't tell you how wonderful it felt slicing through those things....smashing them into oblivion.  To this very day, I get a wonderful rush of adrenalin just thinking about it.

5.  Viking Beserker - According to family lore, my dad's side of the family are descended from Viking warriors known as "beserkers."  That might explain my temper.  It's never been much of a stretch for me to feel like there is a pretty fierce, aggressive personality lurking inside me.  That would probably come as quite a surprise to most of my friends.  It's something that I try to keep a pretty tight handle on because you don't want to be around a beserker when they've gone beserk.  Just read a few of the old sagas and you'll see what I'm talking about.  I DO have this great desire to spend some time at the Viking Inn out in Minnesota some day with the Commander.  And there are days when I am just itching to tear into my food with my bare hands and to sling those meat bones on the floor.  One of these days!

If you'd like to add your two-cents' worth to this Friday's Fave Five meme, visit Susanne's blog at Living to Tell the Story.

My Name is Dee and I'm a Perfectionist!

I've been feeling a tad unappreciated lately. Here I've sat, practically chained to the computer while working away on my daughter's wedding pictures and all I've heard is "Aren't you done with those pictures yet?" I had hoped that I would feel the joy spreading up from the D.C. area as my dear child thought of me slaving away, taking such great care to edit her pictures so precisely but the only thing I've been feeling is my hips spreading from all this sitting.

I suppose I could have just whizzed through the 600+ photographs and only taken the time to edit out the red eyes from people but that isn't how I operate. You see, I'm a perfectionist. If I'm going to do something, I want to do it right, as in "suck in your breath, would you look at this, hold on to your hat, Martha, you ain't ever seen anything like THIS before, it's better than anyone on the face of the planet could have done it," right.

Now, I could have left this picture just like this and most couples wouldn't have minded at all. But a perfectionist would have looked at this picture and heard that phone in the background ringing every time they looked at it. Who in the world puts a phone on the front of a choir railing? Does the choir director call the sound booth in the middle of the service if the music doesn't start on time for the anthem and say, "Hey, could you cue up the tape already?" No, that phone had to go. So I used my handy little Creative Memories photo editing program and in a matter of a few minutes, the photo now looked like the one on the left.

No phone! Much less distracting, wouldn't you agree? But I haven't been stopping with just phones. Oh no! I've been taking out distracting microphone cords dangling from the ceilings above the wedding party. I've been erasing huge and unsightly speaker boxes from the walls behind the family photo groupings up on the stage. If people in the photos have had eyes glowing as red as embers, looking like they're possessed by who knows what, I've given them back their normal eyes. If they've happened to be wearing contacts, I've even given them back pupils where before they had opaque white circles staring back at the camera.

If everyone looked good in a photo except for one or two whose eyes weren't open, I've been examining the photo to see if there was some element that I could save out of it. For example, in the photo on the right, our groom has his eyes shut. But it is a really nice picture of the bride and her father. So I just cropped out the groom and myself and left in the two on the left. I had to do a little "erasing" of the groom out of the cropped picture but I can do that with the miracle of the cloning tool in my editing bag of tricks.

Gone is the groom (temporarily) and now we have a nice shot of the bride and her dad. But I didn't just whip that up in two seconds. That took a little time.

I'm also doing things like sharpening the focus when the pictures are fuzzy. Sometimes I'm purposely blurring the background when there is nothing in the background of note so that the bride and groom will really stand out, or in today's terms, so that they will "really pop." I'm assessing the colors and adjusting color temperatures as needed or changing shadows, highlights, contrasts to bring out the best in each picture. Sometimes I'm even taking off double chins.

My son-in-law is NOT prone to having double chins. He's in fine shape, works out and has muscles in all the right places, according to my daughter. But anyone, when tilting their head
in a certain way and looking down, will end up with a double chin. Just think back to some of your drivers license photos. I knew that I could remove that extra chin and I decided to do it. Why not? Wouldn't you want to look your best in your wedding photos? Some day when your skinny son is looking at your wedding pictures and you are 30 pounds overweight and he says to you, "Hey, Dad, is that REALLY you?" , don't you want to be able to say, "Yeah! Looked pretty good, didn't I?" You betcha! So now, here's the happy couple after a little help from Mom.

I did contemplate trying to shave off about 4 inches from my hips in some of the pictures but couldn't quite figure out how to shave off a comparable amount from my torso so had to resist the urge and move on to other challenges.

So when my daughter says, "Mom aren't you done with those pictures yet?", she should remember that creative genius can't be rushed. I am a perfectionist and I'm going to take the time to do it right.

Maybe it would help if I put it in terms that she would understand. OK, here goes. NOTE TO MY CHILDREN: Do NOT rush me! I have editing tools and I know how to use them.