What Happened to Kindness?

I was reading Thena Smith's blog and came across this post, How Do We Bring Back Kindness? I have thought about this subject before, especially what happened to it in the first place.

Thena and I grew up in a world that is so totally different from today in many ways. It was a trusting world where we knew most people we came in touch with every day. Neighbors knew each other, by sight if not well.

I have often thought that things began to change when air conditioning became affordable for most people to have in their homes. Before they could spend summer days inside comfortably, most people in the cities, suburbs, and rural areas spent late afternoons and evenings outside while the indoors cooled down. You saw your neighbors sitting under a shade tree, on their porches, on the front stoop, or on the fire escapes. You might have moseyed over to talk and share a lemonade, an iced tea, a beer. Windows were open, so even if you were inside you heard the outdoor sounds and people talking. Children played outside in the streets, the parks, the vacant lots, someone's yard.

I have always liked to drive for relaxation. I don't go any place special, just make a circle and end up back home. One summer afternoon about 1980 I was driving along and realized that things seemed strange. I finally figured out it was the absence of people. Everyone was in their own house with the AC running, windows closed. No children were throwing balls or riding bikes. No adults sat on the porch or in the yard talking. In fact, most houses didn't really have a porch anymore, just a few steps up to the door. I noticed that this was as true in rural areas as in the cities and suburbs.

Another thing that changed was shopping. As a young child, I can remember neighborhood grocery stores. There was one every few blocks within walking distance. Mom knew the grocer by name. The people in the store were neighbors that you talked with as you shopped. I can remember walking to the neighborhood store with my grandmother. We would stop and talk or at least wave to neighbors along the way. But then the supermarkets came along and put the mom-and-pop groceries out of business. When you went to the store, you were waited on by strangers and saw mostly strangers in the store.

The same was true of other stores. Nearly everything has been replaced by the big box stores and malls. Even the stores of small towns suffered because people could hop in the car to go shop in the city. Of course, you many run into a friend or family member, but most of the time you see and deal with strangers.

These changes have isolated us from other people, our neighbors. We don't know each other anymore. People tend to distrust what they don't know.

And the media has made us fearful of our neighbors, making us suspicious that someone is always out to get us. Anytime something happens, like an kidnapping or a mugging, it makes the news. Some make the national news and you hear about it for days. It just increases the fear. Even an older lady like me gets suspicious looks if I smile or speak to a child in a store.

And then there is the stress that most people live under. Society expects us to always be doing something. Everything is at top speed. Everybody is overbooked, including the kids who have team sports, music lesson, dance lesson, etc. in addition to homework. They don't really have time to be kids anymore.

So we have become a society of stressed, isolated, and fearful people. It is much easier to be rude and unkind to someone you don't know and fear. And stress can itself make us short-tempered and rude, even to those we love.

I know this is an oversimplification of the problem. But I do think this is at least part of the problem. But as to the answer to Thena's question, how do we bring back kindness, I have no idea, except to try to be kind myself.

The End of the Beginning

Netscape, one of the browsers that started us on this journey through what is known as the World Wide Web, is to be no more soon. In just a little over ten years, so much has changed. Much of what happens on the web today was beyond most people's imaginations then. Wonder what another ten years will bring?

A Winter Sunset

I had some errands to run late this afternoon. A front was moving clouds our way. I grabbed my point-and-shoot camera in case there was a good sunset before I got back home. Sunset views are rare here in the hollow since we are surrounded by hills and mountains.

So on my way home I am trying to figure out where I can get a good shot of this sunset that was on its way. I tried several places, but I couldn't find a place to park that was high enough to keep the trees from blocking the horizon. Finally, I passed the turn in to the livestock sale lot. Bingo! I turned around and went back.

When I got up on the hill, there was a man on a posthole digger working away in the field where I needed to point the camera. I am glad the light in my eyes was making it too hard to see the look on his face. He had to be wondering what this crazy lady was doing pointing a camera at him. He even stopped working, but finally started back again. I guess he figured out I was after the sunset, and not him. You can just barely see the posthole digger at the bottom middle of the first photograph in the larger version.


In the second photograph, I moved the camera just to the right of the first one. You can see the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background and all of those new posts in the foreground.


You can see larger versions of the photos by clicking on them.

Scrapping at 200ppi

While looking for another Paint Shop Pro script, I came across one to change a 300ppi scrapbooking kit into 200ppi kit as a batch file. I knew the gurus of PSP who participate in the Corel PSP newsgroup were working on it. But I have trouble dealing with prolific newsgroups on my old pokey dialup connection. I don't visit regularly and missed this. I haven't tried it out yet, but if Sally Beacham says its good, I will take her word. The link is on her website.

You may be asking why you would want to change the resolution of your kits. If you have a newer computer and lots of RAM, you might not want to. But if you have an older computer and/or not enough RAM, and applying effects to your scrapping projects takes forever, you will find that working with materials in 200ppi will make a lot of difference. Read Sally's article that goes with the kit.

Happy Day After

I hope everyone had a nice holiday and had a chance to wind down today, unless you went shopping. I am sure the bargain hunters were out today. You would not have seen me there. In fact, the only shopping I have done since before Thanksgiving was at the grocery store. I can't stand all that madness, so I stock up on necessities so I don't have to go back until mid-January. Of course, if you have been reading this blog for very long, you may have already figured out that I hate to shop at any time. Most of the stuff I buy other than food, paper products, and cleaning products is ordered after finding it in a catalog.

Remember the organizing of the printed tuts and articles a few months ago. And I was not going to end up with stacks of paper again. It didn't work. What happens is I print out a tut and think, "I really want to try that", and leave it on my desk. But I don't get around to doing it. After I have about an inch of paper, I move it off the desk. I had a stack over a foot high. I spent the morning filing. It was much easier to drop them in a folder than to put them in notebooks.

I have the tuts sorted so I can find several tuts on a subject when I need them. For instance, I need to figure out how to make the candy part of some suckers I've made look more like hard candy. I am going to pull out the glass tuts and see if I can figure out the best way.

I need to get back to working with Photoshop. I think I have forgotten half of what I knew. The Paint Shop Pro lessons are basically finished. The group shut down for the holidays to give the mods a break. They do stay busy helping every one out. I may not start up again when the break is over. I have so much to do once I go back to work. I will be working five days a week for a while.

Speaking of tutorials, I am wondering what will happen at DigiScrap Designer. If you haven't heard, the site is shut down without any explanation from the owner. There is lots of speculation. You can read some of it at DigiShopTalk.

Someone did post the text of some of Tandika's tutorials on a smack blog and then links to others located on a file-sharing site. I think that is wrong, but I was not surprised it happened. She upset a lot of people by taking down many of the tutorials and then deleting threads in her forum when questions were asked about why the tutorials were removed. I remember thinking at the time that she was causing problems for herself. The atmosphere in the digiscrapping community has been very adversarial of late. It is not the time to make some people mad. Piracy has been rampant and some are doing it with any provocation.

I'm glad I made paper copies of the tuts and have them all in notebooks. Many I have never done, but they are there waiting. I originally subscribed to the site to find out how to make some scrapping elements. This was before I got PS, but I had learned how to translate most tuts from PS into Paint Shop Pro. Once I got PS, I started doing the tuts as written to help me learn PS. They are very good for that and usually result in a good product. I like to do a tut as written and then redo it adding my own touches to it.

It's time for bed. The cats have already tried to make it into the bedroom. I usually let them get on the bed with me while I read a while. Then I throw them out of the bedroom. I get much more sleep without them hopping on and off the bed all night.

Good night.

Bits and Pieces

It's been a while since I have had time to blog. I have been busy with work and graphic projects that needed to be finished. It was all finished yesterday. Now I have two weeks off to do what I want, more or less. There are a couple of obligations, but nothing that is going to take too much time.

I have a long list of things I want to do, but first on the list is resting up. I have discovered that I no longer can work well under deadlines and short sleep. I was absolutely wiped out. I went to bed before seven last night and slept nearly twelve hours. No alarm clock is being set for the next week. I am sleeping until I wake up naturally.

One thing I know is that I MUST develop some layered scrapping templates to rely on when I have scrapping projects to do for other people. If they have a time deadline, they will just have to take what I have. That is a project I am starting on this next week. And I am working on modifying my calendar grids so they will be ready for any 2009 calendars I do next year.

The rest of this blog post is just some odds and ends I have been meaning to share.

• If you use Paint Shop Pro, do you know that there are scripts that come with PSP that makes calendars, either for a month or for a year? At least, there are in versions 8, 9, and 10. I don't know about the newer versions. You can choose your own font and color. I have been using the month script to make my monthly desktop wallpapers and I used it to make the calendar grids for the scrapped calendars I made this year. Just look for "CalendarMonth" or "CalendarYear" in the scripts menu.
  
  UPDATE: OOPS! The calendar scripts didn't come with PSP. Thanks to Ernie for pointing that out to me. I don't remember downloading them, but I did. By opening the script with the Edit button on the script toolbar, I found out that the scripts were created by Jos Croeze, who is a regular over at the Corel PSP newsgroup. I hunted down a link to the scripts for you.
  
  Just a warning about PSP scripts: they are written in a computer language called Python, which means the creator could put in a bug to mess up your computer. Be careful and know your source if the script directions say put it in the Scripts-Trusted folder.
  


• I came across The Shoe Project some time ago and kept meaning to share the link. I had lots of fun trying to guess how the person attached to the shoes would look. There were quite a few surprises.


• On a more serious note is this article, Top 8 Reasons Why Non-Teachers Can Never Really Understand Our Job. No one really understands who has not been in the trenches of teaching. There was a person working in a medical office who never let the chance go by to make a dig about how much vacation time teachers get. I replied not too politely one day after I finally had enough. The long hours with little sleep and lots of stress were among the top reasons I retired from the public schools when I did. I still love teaching, but enough is enough. It does take a physical toll.

After supper I am going to read. I have been missing my reading time. I have several novels checked out from the library to get me through the weekend and into next week.

Book Review: Rhett Butler's People

This new novel by Donald McCaig is the second authorized novel based on Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. The first was Scarlet by Alexandra Ripley. This one is LOTS better.

The main character in Gone with the Wind is Scarlet. Although Rhett is an important character, we know him mainly through his interactions with Scarlet. McCaig has fleshed out the character of Rhett to let us know what makes him what he is.

The first part of the book deals with Rhett's childhood. The relationships with his father and his childhood friends have much to do with why he is such an unconventional Southern gentleman. His long-standing friendship with Belle Watling begins early in his life. Characters introduced in this part of the book reappear throughout the story.

McCaig also looks at Rhett's close relationship with his younger sister, Rosemary. If she was in GWTW, I don't remember her. (My last reread of GWTW was about 20 years ago.) But she plays an important part in this book due to her relationship with Rhett and also her friendship with Melanie Wilkes.

If there is a weakness in this book, it is in the part that covers the same time period as GWTW. If you have read GWTW, there will be no problem. But if you are reading it first, you may find this part a bit lacking. Events that were very important in GWTW are often reported from one character to another in letters. They summarize the events instead of giving lots of details. I guess this was McCaig's way not to take too much from Mitchell's work.

That is not to say the middle of the book is not interesting. A lot of this part is about Rosemary and her husbands who were both Rhett's childhood friends. It also tells of Rhett's adventures from the time he leaves Scarlet on the outside of a burning Atlanta until he mets her again in her green dress made from the draperies.

The ending of the Scarlett-Rhett story is very different from that created by Ripley in Scarlet. I will just say that I found Rhett Butler's People much more plausible and more satisfying.