Month: January 2018

When you’re all alone, take a ‘selfie’!

Sue selfie Jan 2018Let’s talk about photographs. Of ourselves.

I recently got my picture taken for the church directory. This ponytailed kid young enough to be my grandson put me through all the poses he’d been instructed to use for women: sit, stand, tilt your head, smile. Afterward, he took me into the other room for the big sales pitch. These guys don’t make their money on church directories. They make their money selling photo packages for the folks to give to their friends and families. The sample photos all showed happy couples and moms and dads with their kids, no singles like me.

I wasn’t planning to buy any fancy framed photos. Four years ago, I bought a CD containing all the shots and used them as author publicity photos. I thought I might do that again if the pictures were good. Just in case, I got my hair cut and put on eyeliner and my mother’s blue scarf. But I hated this year’s pictures. My smile was fake, and I never realized I had so many wrinkles.

The photographer insisted on flipping through the options anyway. I felt like I was at the eye doctor: which do you like better, 1 or 2, 3 or 4? None. I picked the least obnoxious shot for the directory.

“Don’t you want to give copies to your children and grandchildren?” he asked.

“I don’t have any,” I said.

“Oh!” Apparently it never occurred to him that someone my age might not have anyone who was interested in putting her picture on display. It’s one of those things people who are not alone don’t think about.

I don’t get my photo taken very often. Not a single picture of me was taken at Thanksgiving or Christmas. I received Christmas cards full of photos of kids, dogs, and retired couples on cruises, the same stuff I see on Facebook. But I had no pictures to send.

I’d be invisible but for selfies, pictures I take of myself, and I’m terrible at them. If I manage to get my whole face in the picture, it shows my frustration or it’s at such a weird angle that I delete it right away. Once in a while when I’m dressed up and feeling attractive, I’ll try again. Sometimes I succeed. My new Facebook profile photo is the latest effort. Was my nose always so big? Don’t answer that.

I prefer to pretend I’m gorgeous and 25 years old. A little self-delusion is healthy.

Sitting on my desk waiting to be scanned are two of my parents’ photo albums from the early days of their marriage. I love going through them, seeing how young and attractive they were, studying pictures of my brother and myself as we grew up. Mom and Dad documented everything with their old-fashioned box cameras, shooting eight or twelve pictures to a roll in black and white, saving the prints in their albums. Most of the pictures look as good now as they did 60 years ago. I don’t know what will happen with today’s digital photos stored in our computers.

But I’m straying off course. As a widow with no kids, I have no one to be photographed by or to take pictures of. Nor do I have someone to inherit the photos when I die. My selfies are a temporary fix.

What is the purpose of “selfies” anyway? Although some of my Facebook friends seem to post new selfies every day (Ego? A need for FB friends to compliment them?), it seems like most people use them to shoot pictures of themselves with someone else. It’s like those old-time photo booths you can still find at theme parks, where two people squeeze in and make goofy faces at the camera. Now, one person holds up the cell phone, they get close together and make goofy faces.

If my parents had had “selfies,” maybe there wouldn’t be so many pictures of my mother standing alone in front of a monument or a tree or a museum. She and Dad would both be standing in front of the monument or tree or museum.

Cell phone selfies, a 21st century phenomenon, are not the first instance of people photographing themselves. Ever since we had cameras, people have been devising ways to run around in front and get themselves in the picture. I tried putting the camera on a tripod, setting the timer and dashing around to pose. The pictures were always awful. There’s also the mirror method, in which you point your camera at your reflection in a mirror, but they always show a camera in your face and your features come out backward. Only recently have we had cameras designed to turn the lens on ourselves. The cameras are embedded in our cell phones, tablets and laptop computers.

“Selfie” is a relatively new word. The rumor is it came from an Australian guy who bashed his lip and took a picture of it to post online. He called it a “selfie.” The word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. I keep thinking that grammatically, it should be spelled selfy. How do you conjugate that thing? To selfie? selfying, selfied, had selfied?

I hate staring at myself while taking a selfie. I look ugly. Why does my mouth move so weird? Why don’t the sides of my hair ever match? The old way of getting your picture taken and not seeing the results for at least a week had some definite advantages.

I need to work on my selfie technique. I found some good advice online: Avoid shadows, use natural light, hold the camera at your eye level, don’t over-pose, and feel free to edit the picture—but not too much. Chin down, tilt head slightly just like that church photographer told me to do. Actually just like every photographer my whole life has told me to do. Here’s another new word: Smize. It’s when you smile with your eyes while keeping your lips and teeth neutral. It’s supposed to be sexy. When I try it, I see a bad case of RBF, resting bitch face.

My selfie technique needs work, but if I want a picture of myself, rather than going to the young punks who want to charge me hundreds of dollars for the privilege, I’ll hold up my cell phone, strike a pose and do it myself-ie.

I found a YouTube video on how to take a perfect selfie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqIQcKNE7E Well sure, with her face . . .

Here are some other links about the selfie phenomenon:

“How to take a good selfie: 12 selfie tips to consider”

“History of the Selfie: a Photo Phenomenon” 

“Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie” 

Do you take selfies? Alone or with others? When? Why? How do they turn out? Do you have any advice or special techniques to share? Feel free to share your own selfies, the good ones or the embarrassing ones.

 

Psst! Wanna read a novel that’s not out yet?

I’m doing something that really scares me. I’m inviting people to be “beta readers” for my unpublished novel, Up Beaver Creek.

The experts say that’s the thing to do before you independently publish. So I’m sending out copies and asking people for their honest answers to questions about the book, things like: Do you like the title? Can you identify with the main character? Do you get confused or bored? Have I got the setting right? Do the events that happen sound real? This story takes place on the Oregon coast, and I live in fear that my fellow Oregonians will tell me I’ve got it all wrong.

The thing is, I feel done with the book. I put it through the critique group wringer, rewrote it several times, pitched it all over hell and gone, and I’m more than ready to have it out in the world. With today’s technology and Amazon’s Createspace, I could make that a reality this week. But the experts say I need to get feedback and do a final rewrite first. What if I don’t want to know? Too bad.

Writing is a crazy business. If I were a plumber, I wouldn’t invite people to come look at my work and tell me whether or not they like how I did it. Unless the pipes burst or the sink overflowed, I’d pack up my tools, collect my money, and never look back.

Being a newspaper reporter was a little that way, too. You write it, turn it in, and move on. Once in a while, someone might object or you might get special praise for a particularly good story, but in general, I just moved on to the next assignment.

But in this book biz, your work is forever being analyzed, reviewed and criticized. You revise, revise, and revise again. Before you publish, you do your best to make sure it’s as close to perfect as possible. I’m not just talking about typos, although every single one is an embarrassment. No, I mean the whole story overall. Does it make sense? Will the reader finish thinking, “Huh?” “That was lame,” or “Wow, that was good”? We want the latter, of course.

Your family and friends will usually tell you it’s wonderful, even if it isn’t. Hence, the beta readers. The name comes from the high-tech world where programmers release a beta version of a new program to outside people who will test it. The alpha version could be compared to the first draft, which the programmers test in-house.

I could still use a few more readers. It’s a novel, a light-hearted one which should be fun to read. The questions are not difficult. Beta readers will receive a finished copy of the paperback and their names will be listed in the acknowledgements. If you’re interested, click on bit.ly/2qM9zJt for the enrollment form. To read an excerpt from the book, click on https://suelick.com/new-novel-up-beaver-creek.

This is a lot like letting people see me without makeup. Or maybe more like inviting strangers to comment on my face. No way! But a book is just words. They can be changed.

Thank you for being here. I welcome your comments.

 

Ding-Dong, the Pellet Stove is Dead

45f2e-dscn3711Let’s talk about heat. I didn’t think too much about it growing up in San Jose. The old-time gas heater embedded in the floor between the living room and the hall poured out sufficient heat to keep us warm in our three-bedroom tract house. It was also a great place to spy on the grownups because we kids could look through the grill from the hall and see what was going on, especially on Mom’s canasta club nights. The only drawback was our marbles falling through the grate and into the depths when we were shooting them across the brown tweed carpet. Bang, rattle, rattle. Quick, get it out before Dad catches us.

No, we didn’t think much about heat. The outside temperature stayed above 70 degrees most of the time, and it rarely rained. The heater would come on with a gentle whuff, and all was well. Deep inside, the blue flame of the pilot light kept burning. Almost 70 years later, it still works. The fireplace, also a trap for errant marbles, was mainly for entertainment, not for warmth. It hasn’t been lit since the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

In San Jose, we thought more about avoiding heat. The temperature crept into the 80s, 90s and 100s from late spring through fall, but ours was a low-tech house. Air conditioning? Open a window. Turn on a fan. (Don’t touch the fan, it will cut your hand off.) That old house with its minimal insulation soaked in the heat. Still does. When I walked in last summer to visit my father, it was so hot I wanted to walk right back out. The only place I could find any relief was on the front porch, and even that was relative. At night, I’d sleep uncovered and backwards, feet on the pillow, trying to get my head as close to the window as possible. My hair almost touching the dusty screen, I was still sweating.

But here on the Oregon coast, heat is an issue, not like in the places where houses and cars are buried in snow. I don’t know how folks in the Midwest and East Coast stand it. Our temperature is more chilly than cold, I guess, miserable, but not life-threatening. When I woke up this morning, it was 46 outside and 62 inside. No big deal, just turn on the heater, right? Ah, but in the forest where I live, heating is funky. Natural gas lines do not reach this far, and few houses have whole-house heating systems. Or cooling systems, as if we ever need that. We have baseboard heaters, cadet heaters, plug-in portable heaters, woodstoves, fireplaces, and pellet stoves. Most houses, including mine, have firewood stacked high and deep for the winter. Shops selling pellets have a hard time keeping them in stock.

With all of these heat sources, a body has to think about heat. Chop the wood, light the fire, fill the pellet stove, turn it on, clean it out, buy more pellets. Turn on the little heaters or not? Don’t forget to turn them off lest you burn the house down. We think about heat all the time. We turn on NPR in the morning, listen to the weather report and groan.

I’ve got five different thermometers in the house, one of them an indoor-outdoor one. I’m constantly checking. Is it warm enough inside? Should I turn something on or off? How cold is it outside? Do I need a coat and gloves or just a hoodie? Dare I sit out on the deck and read my book? Is it going to freeze? Should I cover my pipes? Will I be able to drive to church or the store if there’s ice on the road?

Heat. For years, I have been posting about and cursing about my pellet stove. Yesterday, a repairman declared the old Quadra-Fire dead. Unplugged forever. May it rest in peace, amen. How many hours have I stood in front of that thing reading, writing, thinking, playing my guitar, or gazing out the window, usually with my feet straddling the dog. I singed the back of my old bathrobe getting too close. If I could add up all the time I’ve spent feeding it and cleaning out ashes and half-burnt pellets, it would probably come out to a couple of weeks. If I added up all the time I have spent waiting for repairmen to fix it, it’s probably a year. But now that it’s done for, I’m sad. Forever hopeful, I had just bought 15 bags of pellets and given the stove a name: Charlie. I probably jinxed it.

When Kevin from Airrow Heating pulled it apart yesterday, he exposed the ruined heat exchange mechanism as well as an information panel that said the stove was installed in 1992, six years before Fred and I bought the house. Twenty-five years and change, a longer-than-average lifespan for a pellet stove.

I have ordered a new one, opting to stick with the devil I know rather than try a different system. It’s coming a week from Thursday. It’s going to cost far more than I can afford. I’m going to be doing some fancy financial footwork for a while. A miracle infusion of cash would be helpful.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a patchwork of little heaters that make it almost warm enough. My body is adapting. Right now I’m overly warm in my bathrobe, and my office thermometer says it’s 62 degrees in here. At a jam session Sunday night, I got so hot I had to strip down to my tee shirt.

Am I doing the right thing ordering another pellet stove? I don’t know. But I will never take heat for granted again.

The Houseplants That Wouldn’t Die

IMG_20180108_084024329[1]I’m not great with houseplants. They’re lucky if I remember to water them once a week. Feed, mist, dust, re-pot, pluck off the dead parts? Ha. I only pay attention when they’re either dead or threatening to become monsters like “Audrey II” in “Little Shop of Horrors.” And yet I have four plants (and their offspring) that over 36 years have outlived 11 moves and a whole marriage. These plants are tough.

Meet Gloria. She’s the Croton with the four arms spread so wide I don’t know where to put her anymore. She’s also the diva who droops her leaves when I have forgotten to water. As soon as I give her a drink, her leaves go back up, their yellow speckles shining. You see her cousins everywhere, but they’re not usually as leggy as my girl, which probably comes from ignoring her needs at a critical time. Cut her down to size? No way!

IMG_20180108_084127555[1]Meet Mikey, a Devil’s Ivy plant who just grows and grows and grows. He lives in my bathroom where it’s pleasantly damp. I know should trim or guide his wild growth, but he never complains. He doesn’t even mind that he’s on top of the toilet tank.

Then there’s Spider, the spider plant who lives these days atop my refrigerator. At times, her leaves and babies get caught in my freezer door, but she keeps going. Her baby, on the kitchen windowsill, is having babies now.

IMG_20180108_084101212[1]Finally, there’s Mother-in-Law, who has outgrown two pots and obviously needs a third. She’s just leaves with sharp points on the ends, but you’ve got to admire a plant that grows so profusely in such difficult conditions. She doesn’t even seem to mind that I have been calling her by the wrong name all these years, mistaking her for a plant I had back in the 1970s. She is a Cast-Iron Plant, Apidistra elatior. Turns out she doesn’t need all the sunlight I’ve been giving her all these years, but look at her grow.

IMG_20180108_084043731[1]All four of these plants came into my life around 1982, when I was working as a reporter for the Pacifica Tribune. I was divorced, living in an apartment two blocks from the office, which was good because my car, a VW Rabbit, was always in the shop. When I wasn’t working, I was singing, dating, or taking moody walks on the beach, so these plants didn’t get much TLC.

When I quit my job and gave up my apartment to sing with a traveling show, I housed them at the Tribune office. When the show went bust and I moved in with my parents until I could get another newspaper job, I brought them with me. When I moved in with Fred, who became my second husband, my plant children came along. And they’re still with me.

Not all of my plants do this well. I’m about to discard yet another dead African violet, and my philodendron isn’t looking too good. My amaryllis lacks both leaves and flowers at the moment. It will recover, or it won’t. You’ve got to be tough to survive here.

I didn’t grow up with houseplants. The only plants inside my parents’ house were either printed on the wallpaper or made of plastic. Dad has a profusion of geraniums in the yard and some roses that could use a little TLC, but even before he broke his leg, he was not into coddling his flowers (or his kids). Guess I’m a cutting off the same vine. But Gloria, Mikey, Spider, and Mother-in-Law don’t need coddling. They don’t like to be fussed over. At this rate, they might outlast me.

I invite your comments. Are you a houseplant guru? Are you dying to come over and rescue my plants? Have I got their names wrong? How many houseplants do you have? How old is your oldest one? Do you pamper your plants or do you neglect them like me? Or do you believe that greenery belongs outside? Care to share a picture of your favorite plant child?

 

Text and photos copyright 2018 Sue Fagalde Lick

 

 

 

Tiny notes of happiness bring smiles

Three years ago, I wrote things that made me happy on tiny slips of paper and put them into a jar. The object was to do it every day and then read them when the year was over. I’m a little late. That was 2015, and now it’s 2018. But these multicolored pieces of paper still make me happy. Three years ago, I was getting over a badly sprained ankle that I injured between Christmas and New Year’s. (read the blog posts about that here and here). My father had survived his heart surgery and had not yet broken his hip. Like now, I was playing and singing at Sacred Heart and plugging away at my writing career. Annie and I walked these coastal woods most days. Her muzzle wasn’t all white then. The tree had not fallen on my fence and house. And gosh, Medicare was way in the future.

I’m thinking I’ll write little happy notes for this year, too. I can start with this morning’s beautiful pink sunrise. Or maybe last night’s full moon. Or the moment after yesterday’s walk when Annie and I visited with our neighbor Pat and the dogs Harley and Cooper. Three big dogs to pet at once and a friend to talk to: Heaven. Even in the midst of horrible times, we can still find little things to be grateful for.

Here are some of the things that made me smile in 2015.

The ankle:

* First sun in winter. First soak in the hot tub since my injury.

* Buying my own groceries despite limping in with a crutch

* Walking to the end of the block

* New ankle brace arrived. Put shoe on, was able to walk almost like a normal person.

* A real dog walk on my sprained ankle, and it didn’t feel too bad.

* Walking on two good feet.

Food!

* Ham and eggs

* Tuna melt at Fishtails

* Turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce and iced tea

* Big salad with slices of linguica on top, Portuguese sweet bread on the side

* Marionberry pie with vanilla ice cream at The Chalet

 * Fresh-baked peanut butter cookies

Writing

* Kind words from an editor who called my novel a feel-good book and my writing masterful

* Reading my poems to the kids and parents in Siletz, feeling like a rock star

* I won a writing contest!

* Reading poems I wrote 34 years ago and finding them good

* Sitting in the sun writing a poem

Music

* Creating a choir of strangers for the World Day of Prayer and making beautiful music from a few pages of words and notes

* Singing full out with mandolin, fiddles, and guitar all in perfect harmony at the South Beach jam

* Feeling the power of my fingers on the keys of a perfectly tuned piano

Miscellaneous

* Laughing with Dad on his 93rd birthday

* Stunning quiet of the coastal forest in soft spring sun. Moss-wrapped fir trees

* The first perfect pink camellia blooms appear on my neighbor’s bush

* Shiny new library books

* Nice repairman makes dryer hum

* Admiring the lawn I just mowed

* Reading and dozing in the loveseat by the fire with Annie sound asleep in my lap

* Spinning out on ice and surviving

* A great night’s sleep

* Doc says I’m healthy

Instead of a jar, this year I’m using a tall, sturdy box with sayings about dogs printed on it. A gift from a friend came in that box, which makes it all the more special.

Join me in saving those little moments. When life gets tough, we can reach in and remember that there are good things to celebrate every day. You’re welcome to share your “moments” here.

Happy New Year to everyone.

Sue