Another Birthday...from wood stoves to microwave ovens.

The first thing I think about is I'm still here. Well I'm not that old but I've lived longer than my mother or her mother. I didn't know my grandmother and she never got to see me. Our lives covered the last century. And the world is a lot more interesting than it was at the beginning of the last century. She was born in a world that was just beginning to discover all the modern things we take for granted.

My grandmother married young. She had three daughters and then she divorced her husband. Well he left her first. Anyway it was disgraceful and even more so when she married a young Italian. She had been raised in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Her friends in the church turned away from her. Her husband was Catholic and he married a divorced woman. They both stopped going to church. They had a son together that they called Valentine. He was born on the fourteenth of February. We called him Uncle Tiny. He was killed in a heavy equipment accident building Interstate 5. He was 39. My husband and I raised my Uncle Tiny's youngest child. Uncle Tiny's wife was my husband's sister.

My grandmother was about 41 when she died. My daughter is 41. My daughter seems so young to me. My grandmother was very unhappy and very ill. Her husband was cruel to her. I have two letters she wrote. The last one is so sad.

My mother hated her stepfather. We saw him when I was a child and Mama would not let us close to him.

Life is life. We make choices and then we live with them or not! My mother was married five times and it wasn't all that easy for my sisiter and I. I promised myself that I would only get married once.

Now my favorite thing is taking digital photos. These first two were taken at Balboa Park a few weeks ago.

These were taken last evening in my yard. I used a 58mm Rokkor lens on my Oly with extension tubes.

The blue flowers are smaller than my fingernail. Focusing is moving the camera back and forth until the shot looks good.