Sidetracked Charley

Mardi and Magique striking a pose The differences in their ages never seemed that large. Magique was a very smart puppy and Mariah was alive then. She had trained Mardi with my help and the two of them trained Magique. I trained both to be photographer dogs. The obeyed off leash and never chased the subject of a photo. We went everywhere together until age began to take a toll on Mardi Gras. She was fifteen when she decided she would not jump in the pickup. Nor would she be assisted. I was ready with a whole host of solutions like ramps. In the end I had to take the Corolla if we wanted Mardi to go. Sad for a dog which had more Rubicon off road miles then some humans. Mardi Gras When she turned 15 and the joint outings became more difficult. She would get lost and disoriented. Magique virtually trained herself to find and retrieve her older buddy. I didn't realize how good Magique had gotten at that until on a neighborhood walk Mardi vanished and when I asked Magique t

"Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us."  Robert Burns. At a period in my life I underwent counseling for one problem and came up with a host of others my counselor thought I should work on. Actually it came down to really only one problem which all my other problems seemed to hang on. It was just a shock it was the one I was most in denial about. Perfectionism. My father was the perfectionist. Not me. My problem was I was not good enough. Never good enough. Not tall enough, not thin enough, not smart enough . . . the list could go on forever. In fact it did. I had to make a list. It is somewhere in one of my many journals I kept religiously before the days of blogs. I was pretty good at that. But perhaps not good enough because I never filled one up to the very last page. And I skipped whole blocks of time. Making the list of my not good enough's was just one exercise. Another was to do something I was horrid at and rate

As a photographer I can be attracted to the light through a window bouncing off a glass on a silver plate and spend several frames recording it only to get home and discover the glass was dirty or there was a fly on the plate, etc. In digital photography there is always something you can do to remedy most flaws but life isn't like that. A Canadian friend posted a photograph of what she could purchase for the $21 Canadian per week for groceries. The photo was still in my mind when I went grocery shopping yesterday.  Forget that where my friend and I live in the rural parts of our countries that going to get the $21 of groceries probably takes that much is gas or petrol. The closest store to my abode charges such high prices I would not even be able to get half of what was in her photo. So it is over the mountain, 50 miles round trip, to shop. I used to go weekly but being able to buy dry and canned goods from Amazon Prime has cut that to about once a mouth for fresh goods wh