Fire Planes

A few weeks ago we had a fire in the hills near here. We could see flames from my place and then the sky was filled with a haze of smoke. After the scare we had a few years ago fires make me very nervous. The fire department was on it and so were the air tankers from Ramona. There was a helicopter too. We could see the fire retardant being dropped. It didn't take all that long to get the fire out. Later we saw on the news that the fire was caused by a motorhome being set on fire. The person in the motorhome ran and while suffering burns was saved. I sat out and took some photos. Wasn't my best day for that. Guess I was tense from the fire and didn't have my camera set right. I did get two photos of one of the planes that were not so bad.

The sky looks light grey from the smoke.

Cactus Blossoms

Cirque du Soleil

Hailey and Jackie and I went to see Totem a production of Cirque du Soleil at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. It was wonderful. Lovely costumes and fun performances. Jackie had been to Cirque du Soleil before but it was all new to Hailey and me. Our seats were at the side but we were in the first row. We had a great view of the show. I had seen one of their shows on TV but it is so much better live. One of the acts was a roller skate couple on a small round platform. They were both beautiful and great skaters. It reminded me of a skating couple that did much the same thing on the top of a platform on top of a moving car in a parade we went to when I was a child.

Totem is so worth seeing. There are no cameras allowed but you can see the web page here http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/shows/totem/default.aspx

I've been uploading my web pages and am pretty much done with all that I had before. I've been using the Coffee Cup editor and their ftp program. Works great.

My Old Web Page

For many years I had a webpage. A few months ago I took it  down thinking that I would find a new server and put it back. The hard drive where my old files are saved was missing for awhile. I found it shoved in a cupboard after some searching.

My new site for the most part it is the same as it was. I have my roses and some art work and photos. It isn't all there yet but it is getting there. My web address is dotcombs.net. I have another web address at dotcombs.org but that one will take awhile to do something with. Back when I started we didn't have the blogs and photo sites that we have now, so I used my pages to show off my photos.

A few years ago I took a class in web design learning Dreamweaver. It was interesting and a lot can be done now, but I'm still using the simple html that I started with. Somewhere I lost my Dreamweaver serial number and the original owners sold the program to another company. I downloaded it when I got it and so didn't have disks. So lost it when I changed computers. I do have it on a hard disk somewhere but no way to make it work. I learned the hard way to never just download an expensive program...send for the disks.

My Nook

I've been reading my way through Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn-Chee books on my Nook. I first read some of these back in the early 1980s though the first book in the series was published in 1970. This series is first great mystery fiction and second an insight into the Navajo of the southwest. The first books I read were borrowed and returned so over the years I didn't get the chance to re read them. So it was a treat to read them again. Almost as if for the first time. I'm getting old and my memory isn't always that good. Two of the later books I had in hardback from Costco...but they are packed away somewhere so now they too are downloaded onto my Nook. I didn't start at the beginning with the first book so the continuing story of Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee was not chronological. I would suggest that anyone reading this series for the first time start at the beginning with the first book and then read them in squence.

There was a movie made of one of the books in 1991 that to me was disappointing. Then PBS filmed three of the books and this series was very well done.

A critic writing on the web had some hard criticism for some of the last of the books in this series. Re reading them I like them just fine. One book, "The Wailing Wind," was sad and a bit hard to re read. I think that is my only criticism of these wonderful books. Tony Hillerman wasn't an author that put out several books in a year. So there are just 18 in the series that covers a period of 26 years. The lives of Joe and Jim changed and grew and aged over these years. It is sad to think that the last in this series really is the last. Tony Hillerman died in 2008.

Kitty House

A few days ago I posted this on facebook.

 

"Last evening when I was using my laptop to surf, I saw a web site about a kitty house. I watched the video...there was a link to see more so thinking I had remembered it I typed thecathouse into my browser. URF! Never type thecathouse in your browser! There is supposed to be an s after cat...catshouse...anyway I got a virus. The darn thing redirected what ever I searched for to sales sites. Guess ...the sites are reasonable OK but so annoying. And I wasn't getting what I wanted. Hopefully I got rid of the virus. And the kitty house is in San Diego and I had read about it a few years ago in our Sunday paper. The couple have put in ramps and stairs and holes for their cats to travel through the rooms of their home. Worth seeing...just don't type cathouse in your browser."

 

The link http://www.thecatshouse.com Just make sure you use this link or if you type the link type, "cats," with an s or you will see something you most likely wouldn't want to see.

Faith

Guess there is supposed to be a lot of people giving up on religion. Someone is saying that more atheists are out there these days than there were in the past. I haven't heard that the Jews as a whole have lost faith. Muslims have become stronger and more important. It must be Christians that are loosing ground. In past years many people became born again Christians. I wasn't raised going to church. In fact I was never in a church with my mother or my father. They both would have called themselves Christian. Some church people stopped by and took my sister and I to church for a few weeks one year. That came to an end when my foot was swollen with a red ant bite and I couldn't get my foot into a shoe. The church lady got upset with my mother because I wasn't ready to go with her...my sister was ready but after a few words were exchanged between the lady and my mama she left and was told not to come back. After that my church experience was going with friends a few times. Then in the 1980s I joined a church that my friend Janey took me too. I wasn't born again though. After a few years I stopped. Not because I lost faith. I've always had faith. I had faith before that childhood experience with the church lady. I guess my mama did raise us to have faith in God. So my faith has always been there.

Mama taught me to say the prayer, "Now I lie me down to sleep. With angels at my head and feet. If I should die before I wake. I pray the lord my soul to take." Thinking about this prayer...It could be scary for a child. I was too young to understand about death though. Anyway my father came in one time and changed the last line to, "O bury me in jelly cake." I thought that was so funny and I laughed and laughed. After that I wouldn't say the prayer the way it was supposed to be. My mama gave up having me say my prayers.

My parents got divorced when I was four. I wasn't as happy after that. Something was missing. I remember looking across the road at my Daddy's house hoping to see him. We were at my Uncle Burt's house then. Sometimes I would walk across the road. Wasn't supposed to do that and if I got caught I got spanked. I would do it anyway. Most of the time I never saw my father there. Later I learned that he had rented the house to other people.

My first stepfather built my Mama a little brick house down the road. My Uncle Burt gave my Mama a small piece of his property for the house. They were going to build a big house and only got the concrete foundation done. My sister and I used to play on the foundation. We lived in the little house when I was six and I remember thinking about God and I knew he existed. I only felt that I might not be good enough to go to heaven. My sister and I got spanked a lot. My mother's marriage to Bob was done and she wasn't happy. Guess it was hard. I don't know how I had faith. Years later I found out that my sister didn't have any faith in God and grew up not believing. Most of all I found out that my Uncle Burt didn't believe there was a God. Would knowing this when I was a child have made a difference in my faith. I know it would not have. We are what we are.

More 1940

Found my husband's family. They lived in Knott County KY. It took a little time but there they were. I used the information from the 1930 census to find them. The last name is his grandmother. She passed in 1949. This was the family in 1940.

1940 Census

The 1940 census is now public. I wasn't born in time to get counted but it didn't take me all that long to find the names of my mother and father. I found the right pages right away and then it was just reading through them one by one. My family was on page 50. I recognized many names of people my family knew along the way. My great grandfather is there with my great uncle. Name spelled wrong...they put an e on the end of Clark. They did get their first names spelled right. Something earlier census takers often did not do. And they mixed up their places of birth. Oh well.

My father's house was right across the road from Grandpa Clark. My mother wanted to go to school so when her mother and step father went back to Washington state my mother stayed behind. She kept house and went to school and married the boy next door...well across the road.

June was my cousin and Russell a family friend. It is strange to see these names on this list and know what was ahead in life for them. They have all passed on and though I wasn't listed I really was there and now I'm the only one left.

Family Photographs

My mother took lots of photos of my sister and I. She had a nice little camera...a bit better than a box camera. She used it for years. I used that same camera to take photos for my high school photography class. Later I took lots of photos of my children too. My sister got our photo album but I took my baby photos out of it first. A few years before my mother died I took her negatives to the drug store and had them printed and made an album so it was right for Barb to have the original album...except for my baby photos. My mother didn't have the negatives for those. I also kept the few photos my mother had from her childhood. Her mother and father also took many photos and kept an album. After the divorce and my grandmother married Sam Dotolo the girls would ask their mother if they could look through the album. One time was too much for Sam. He started yelling at my grandmother and in anger my grandmother threw the album into the fire. The few photos my mother had she got from friends later on.

Mama had many extra photos that didn't go into the album so she separated them and gave them to Barb and I. So with those and the copies I had made I have most of the old photos from my childhood. Now the sad part. My son with the mental problems took my old photos out to a shed on our property and went through them. Some of them were ruined. Some of them were thrown on the ground. I thought they were safe in a closet in the house. It was looking for something else that we found out what had happened. Hailey and my daughter Elizabeth worked very hard to gather them and save them. Now I plan to scan as many as I can to further save them.

This is my great grand father Dexter Clark and his son George Clark. Grandpa Clark was over 40 when he married. He had five children. My great uncle Burt Clark was the oldest. Then there was a girl named Mable then George and then a boy named Lew. Last of all was my grandmother Grace Clark. George was in the Navy during the first word war. He was in an observation balloon that came loose from it moorings and he landed in the sea. A ship rescued him and brought him back to America. George caught the flu on the ship. He had been exposed to TB as a child and he came down sick with that and never recovered. My Uncle Burt had been very close to George. Their mother died of TB when my grandmother was a baby. The youngest children Lew and Grace were put into a children's home. Mable lived with her grandparents and Burt and George stayed with Dexter. Uncle Burt was never sure what happened to his baby brother, he wasn't ever sure what his name was. I found his name and death information on Ancestry.com. Lew died at two years old of pneumonia. My grandmother was taken home by a childless couple who had come to the home to adopt a boy. My grandmother was very sick and the family took her home so she could die in a good christian home.