SImple Things Big Rewards

Alone again Naturally-- Remember that song? I played it over and over on our little 45 rmp record player the one my big sister got with Greenback Stamps. It was portable---meaning it closed up like a suitcase with little white plastic handles so you could carry it around with you...although it was quite heavy..lol NOT like the Ipods of today that you can carry in your shirt pocket and probably lose it in there...its so small! The greenbacks worked much like "reward points" of today. Greenback stamps were given at the grocery store and once you collected entire booklets full (About 30 pages with 30 stamps on a page) that meant a trip to a neighboring town 30 miles away (wow so many 30's there) to the redemption store. We packed the filled greenback books into a paper grocery bag and turned them in for items, like toasters, hair dryers, roller skates, and the list was endless! Christmas time found lines of people dragging bag after bag filled with crumpled and well worn booklets filled with stamps...each had to be licked and placed in a neat row up and down the pages of the booklet. The patrons lined up to redeem their collection for gifts! All you had to do was pay sales tax. It was and still is a great program--these days I use my accumulated points towards my total bill at the checkout, its usually a couple of dollars deducted..which helps! Today its all electronically kept by using your "Pig Card" they swipe it each time you shop. The points are tallied up and it also tracks your spending habits quite well. This magic greenbax (now with a 21st century spelling) all happens at the Piggly Wiggly. Its a southern grocery store chain, and yes they have this huge-headed Pig-Man mascot wearing a butcher's apron---awful thing that used to scare me as a barefooted child running up and down the isles following my daddy while he pushed the "buggy" around the store-(a southern term for shopping cart...I had to relearn that one when I moved back here from NYC, I would ask for a shopping cart and get a blank stare in return) My father was- when he could be- the center of my universe...but he passed away when I was 12- So this entire week my Mom -who is normally my roommate and best friend- is out of town staying with my sister about 150 miles away in the foothills of SC. She will be 85 on her birthday and although she has had many things to try and knock her down -most recently a broken hip that took almost a year to recover from- she is as spry as many half her age. While she is gone it will be my job to keep the bird feeders filled and the birdbath clean and the plants watered...all those are her daily chores. My chores are -everything else-...well not quite..but it took forever to get the mower working again..I replaced one of the spindles on the mower deck, and plugged up a large hole that had worn thru and after trying 6 sizes of V-belt I finally got the correct size a 5/8" X 72" whew... Boy finally got that job done, worked on it for what seems like a month! Now the hard work is done I can get back to my favorite activities like drawing, writing and taking photos with my handy camera! (Ive got it hard right?) Trust me Ive earned this small reprieve from the work a day life Ive been caught up in for over 40 years!

   

I've been trying to work on learning the proper settings to produce dof or depth of field when I desire too-- I made numerous attempts and liked this one, I especially liked it in Sepia so I stuck with that, Then wanted to look even closer and found it very interesting.. The texture that came out of the leaf-really cool.


   Flickr ate my Photo



 Simple pleasures of a simple life what could be better? Now if only I could get a Canon DSLR with my greenbax Wouldnt that be sweet?