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Hey, Go to the TGO Photo Club Pages and see Dave’s display of spring birds in up-state New York.

THEN READ ON TO THINK ABOUT CHANGE!

In the last post I ask you to ponder the changes that the pandemic will bring to your life.

As you ponder, remember that business drives change.  I spent my working years getting computers to do new business things that brought about change.  Some examples: translating documents into dozens of languages, putting together all the parts needed to rebuild an automobile engine, predicting when a company needed new printers, and scheduling the vacancies in the bed and breakfasts in a town in the Texas Hill Country.  Business needs change.

This Coronavirus thing will expedite businesses need for change.

THE PAST:   Here are some photos showing changes of the past to get us thinking of changes in the future:

Today, we all carry this little thing in our pocket that lets us talk to family members anytime we want to.  Zoom and FaceTime let us see them even when they are thousands of miles away.  For me that is real change.

THE FUTURE:  Due to the Coronavirus, business engineers and designers are working in every industry to find new safe ways to keep our entertainment fun, our future daily convinces available, and our business world growing.

I am betting they will be successful and bring about future changes even faster than past changes.  Businesses will think out of the box:

Maybe instead of farmer’s market we will have a drone deliver a package of fresh fruits and vegetables to our front door each week.  A computer could put together a mixture in the package that best serves our particular diet needs.

i heard that Nieman Marcus is going out of business – suppose all mall stores closed.  Then, we customers, could tell our computer the image we wanted – I could say I want to look like that model shown in the catalog. The virtual  store could then package a set of new cloths each month for us, have a drone deliver it to us, pick up our old ones, and recycle them. We would never have to go to a crowded mall again – and we would always be dressed perfectly in the image we wanted.

Suppose golf courses opened up their cart paths to walkers, joggers, and bikers for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. We may all be healthier while living with this stay-at-home Coronavirus rule.

Suppose all stay-at-home families rearranged furniture.  Gloria had me do furniture rearrangement three times since stay-at-home started.  Each rearrangement is like getting a brand new home.  Furniture store owners need to change how they do business to capitalize on this “rearranging thing” that stay-at-home families do.

This battle will change us.  I have been pondering the good that will come from this battle. Here are a couple of my ponderings:

Maybe people will appreciate the less hectic life.  Stay-at-Home activities are less hectic than group activities. Group activities take you away from family per the group’s schedule, they make you compete, they make you do things to impress and please others.

I pondered less hectic “Stay-at-Home” activities that might stick with you when this is all over. You may self meditate, your may stroll with friends, you may cook and eat as a family, you may take daily bike rides together, you may eat more unprocessed  food – healthy vegetables, fish, nuts, cheese, and a little ice-cream.

Maybe we make more phone calls to our family and they to us.  Maybe we spend more time thinking what we can do, remotely, to help friends and family enjoy the “Stay-at-Home” time. 

My whole family spent hours putting together  a big order of food that they knew was very special to my taste.   They coordinated it with our grocery store for deliver to me, today, on my Birthday.  The order:  bananas, raspberries, nuts, raw cauliflower, apples, brie cheese, German sandwich meat, apple pie, chocolate ice-cream, AND WINE. Then, the family organized a Zoom session that lasted nearly an hour – like a digital birthday party with each of us in our own home a thousand miles apart.

All that really made me feel loved – It was a great way to give me a special birthday – Sure hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.

Maybe we will better relish the “Hellos” from more than 6 feet away, from neighbor families sitting on the porch.

Maybe we will enjoy our own routine and help others enjoy their own routine alone – leaving the activities of hectic crowds take a back seat in our daily lives.  That maybe the Silver Lining after this Coronavirus battle is won.

WOW – Go look at Dave’s Woodies – A series of photos I will never forget – TGO Photo Club 

Hey, I think this social distancing may save us.  

Cabin fever seems to be a problem for some folks in our TGO (The Great Outdoors) community. Maybe I have a little touch of cabin fever but not much. I am accustom to being socially distant – so I have been told.

I believe that having a routine fights cabin fever.  I have a daily routine that is much the same as pre-Coronavirus. I try to enjoy a relaxed breakfast, catching up on Gloria’s projects, classes, her painting challenges, & some times we plan maintenance projects on our house. Most of the maintenance work is done by contractors but we need to plan it and I need to find the budget dollars to pay for it. 

Then the day begins.  I try to get outside on my bike for 1 1/2 hours, them play 3 hours with photoShop and this blog. Then I do office work for and hour – for example find a way to afford the maintenance. Then I bike and hike for 2 hours.

Of course in-between I take a nap, shave and bathe, eat, talk to my family more often than before Corona – my son Jim even arranged a Zoom like audio session with the family.   I read digital books – Now reading “The accidental President – Harry S Truman”.  Then, sometimes I listen, alone, to old country western music.

Let us all figure out a way to adapt to the new way.

Being outside on the nature trails, 4 to 5 hours a day, I see Gators, snakes, tortoise, bobcats, eagles, and all kind of fish in the lakes.   While standing on the Nature Trail bridge I watch birds  catching fish for dinner.

I observed that, except for mating, most of the non-bird animals practice social distancing. You seldom see mature gators hanging out together, and bobcats hunt alone.

Snakes, it seems, only get together for mating. Not like us humans who  gather to talk, eat, drink, play Pickle Ball, shuffle board, pray, and sing.

We humans have not been gathering long though. We only developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago. So we have only been gathering to sing and talk for a short period of time.

Now lets look at the gators and snakes.  About 80 million years ago, the alligator appeared. The oldest snake fossil is 167 million years old. I think gators and snakes survived that long by not gathering to talk, sing, and compete at tennis.

Now birds of a feather are different.  You know they hang out in flocks. A total of 182 bird species become extinct since 1500. Avian extinctions are continuing, with 19 species lost in the last quarter of the twentieth century and four more have gone extinct since 2000.

My conclusion – If we humans learn to enjoy ourselves, and stay away from flocks (crowds), we may be around millions of years from now.  If not, our species may be like the birds  become extinct in another 50,000 years.  If you listen to TV news folks, of course, they got us thinking extinction may happen this fall.

Now take a look below – Just for fun I wondered if Coronavirus came from outer space:

At our grocery store on Drummond Island, to help the ball point pen work on our receipt, the owners tape a piece of paper to the surface where the cashier puts the receipt for our signature. 

Now remember somethings on the Island are barely out of the stone age.  The computer that prints the receipt is one of those things.  

You all probably are not aware that you may stand there 5 minutes waiting for the computer to think about printing.  I would like to visit with the cashier but she is very busy staring at the key board as if she is helping the computer in the back room talk to the credit card company somewhere off island. 

So, what do I do, I doodle on the paper taped to the surface. — You know, after one of the longer waits, maybe 7 minutes, I doodled on every spot of white space on the paper. 

Next trip I stopped to get a six pack for my evening by the outdoor fireplace. Guess what I saw there in the store.  The store owner’s  had a special place on the wall over the booze and beer where they hung all my doodles.

WOW, I thought, I can really doodle – I can really draw art  – OOPS, not so fast. Here is what some dictionaries have to say:

Drawing is a work of visual art — the result of a productive process — whereas doodling is not. 

Drawing is meaningful. It communicates something, whether form, space, likeness, action, or ideas.  Doodle is to scribble aimlessly.

Oh well, stay sane by digitally scribbling aimlessly while cooped up by the restrictions the governments has had to put in place to control the Coronavirus:

You know, in these days of change, Our happiness is controlled by our tolerance of change and our skill at learning new things.  Actually, change and learning new things are the same. If you change you learn new things and if you learn new things you change.

In general, there is a tight connection between creativity, tolerance, and learning.  It has been my goal, in retirement, to practice creativity, tolerance, and learning each day.  You see, I try to practice change each day.

Think about how things changed in the 30 years since I retired for the first time:  Changes in international travel, many corporate executives are now Mothers, same sex marriages out in the public, cell phones in every persons pocket, phone cameras with us all the time, growth in personnel finances, Zoom brings together communities of folks with similar interests from  all around the world,  internet, Uber, … Oh my .… it has been a fun 30 years for us that embraced the change. 

Now, researchers are helping Universities develop programs aimed at better preparing young people for creativity in their life and work in an increasingly changing economic and social environment.

These University programs define creativity as Five Habits of Mind:

1. Inquisitive

Exploring and Investigating

Challenging assumptions

2. Stick With It

Tolerating uncertainty

Daring to be different

3. Creative Imagination

Playing with possibilities

Using intuition freely

4. Disciplined Action

Developing new techniques

Reflecting critically

5. Work Together

Giving and receiving feedback

Cooperating – Sharing

 

Being in Corona lock-down gives us lots of time to create using our Mind’s 5 habits.   Yesterday, I even ordered my groceries, for the next 2 weeks, online and had them delivered to my doorstep!

Playing with PhotoShop is not new to me, but playing with PhotoShop to create abstract art is a change for me.  This week I’ve been thinking about abstract art by studying how the masters of art and great photographers use color and form.

FIRST:  Go see Dave Cesari beautiful photos from up north. TGO Photo Club – left column. The color and detail that Dave captured is beyond my description. Just look at his photos and enjoy them as much as I did.

THEN READ THIS:The cell phone has changed so many of us – we take photographs every day – at least I do.  

It influences how we communicate. Before cell phone photos, I had to verbally tell you of things that caught my attention, of things I loved to see, and of things I just wanted tell you about.

Now days my kids and I send text phone photos almost every day – a picture is worth a thousand words – Oh my who said that? And I just thought of this – Digital photos do not have Coronavirus germs on them – they are 100% safe..

Oh yes, with such ease to take photos – It has made each of us an artist.  Photography allows us to express ourselves through an art form. We notice a beautiful landscape,  a bird that is the same color as it’s food, or a gator hiding in the pond.  We want to capture each of them.  We are prompted to create something. The creation of an image makes us an artist.  It feels good.

Sometimes I take this thing called art creation a step further.  I start with a real photo and I create yet another image.  These new images just seem  to pop up on the computer screen in front of me.

That is a bunch of stuff/stories I wanted to tell you – It would have been difficult to do if I did not have my cell phone camera to make pictures to tell my story to you.

 

I hope the virus does not keep me inside – by decree or by actually having the disease. I am very careful using Purell, soap, and 6 foot social distance. So far, I am able to spend around 4-6 hours per day out and about.

When indoors, I study and play with photos. I study the question “why we take photographs” – It seems appropriate that I should study the question since I ran the Photo Club here at TGO for many years. 

This is number 8 of one list of many reasons for taking a photograph:

“8. PHOTOGRAPHY LETS YOU SEE THINGS THAT YOU MAY NEVER NOTICE OTHERWISE”

Taking a photograph lets me see things I never noticed when I saw the situation.  I take hundreds of pictures some weeks. How can I do that?  Do I cary my camera along with me all the time? – Yes, I do exactly that. My camera is my cell phone.

When I look at something with my eyes only, I can’t possibly take in every aspect that is within my vision. For instance, a beautiful sunset only lasts so long and I may not notice all aspects of how the colors play on the water.  Or, the snake raised its head and look me in the eye for a split second but I did not notice the twitching of the tail.

When back home, I look at the photograph on my computer.  I have all time I want and I see see things I never saw when I snapped it.

But more important is, when outdoors with my camera, I saw things – like a wasp – that I was too slow on the finger to include in the photograph. By the time I snapped the photo the wasp was gone!  So, I use PhotoShop to make the photo show you what I saw even though the camera did not catch it.

I do not use Photoshop all the time – some times it is really as I snapped it – Anyway here are some things I saw that I want you to see too – Some are real and some are fixed up a little to include things that I saw, wanted to see, and did not capture.  Hope you enjoy these few snaps of my time out-and-about as much as I enjoyed being out-and-about.

What do I do when in the middle of a pandemic?

Well yesterday I took 6 big boxes of stuff – much I moved from NY, to Rhode Island, to Texas, to Michigan, then to Florida – to a “community-provided” service called shredding – Yea!  Otherwise, I spend a lot of time studying things that I do not think about in non-pandemic times.

Here are five things I studied and I will pass on to you just for fun – I want you to smile after you read it just to show me it was fun!  

1.  Pandemic:  A pandemic is a disease epidemic that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. A widespread endemic disease with a stable number of infected people is not a pandemic. Further, flu pandemics generally exclude recurrences of seasonal flu

2.  Nephophilia: A person who loves clouds; love of clouds; fondness or obsession of clouds.

3.  Apophenia: is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.

4.  Pareidolia is a type of Apophenia. Some common examples are seeing a likeness of Jesus in the clouds or an image of a man on the surface of the moon.  Pareidolia causes people to see patterns such as faces and images in everyday objects. People with pareidolia give human characteristics to random things such as doorknobs or vegetables or a house.

5..There are 10 major cloud types. In addition to cirrus, stratus, cumulus, and nimbus clouds, there are cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, altostratus, altocumulus, stratocumulus, nimbostratus, and cumulonimbus clouds.

What else do I do when in the middle of a pandemic? I look at and play with photos:

 

I know I am in the danger age for coronavirus – but so far it has not impacted me as much as some I know.  My family in NY , NJ and CT sure has had major daily pattern changes.

Here in TGO all meeting, restaurants, churches, and more has been shut down – actually everything has been shut down. Some how my writing and photo groups have given me challenges via the internet – no meetings needed – just digital socializing.

Then, Heather sent me a photo of late winter and suggested I show that it is not discouraging to look at a late dusting of snow but show a hint that spring is really there. Again I was  encouraged to take on a remote digital socializing challenge.

So here goes:

 

 

 

From Dave Cesari – Do not forget to go to the TGO Photo Page – Dave posted 7 photos just before he is heading to NY for the summer – But, he will post photos from NY, so keep checking back.

MY STORY FOR TODAY – I grew up on a Brethren farm in a Brethren farm community. So, everyone I knew was Brethren. Each family did nothing but farm.  We each, basically, ate what we grew and we grew what we ate.  We seldom went to the store, we kind of lived the way we all have to do now that Coronavirus is here.  So, if we let our mind go back 80 years this new way of life, that the TV says we have to live, is really just an old way of living.

But, I sure have evolved a lot – If I do not go to store to purchase my coffee, my wine, my chips, my honey crisp apples, bananas, 5 kinds of nuts, soft cheese, frozen cherries,   …………  You got the message – I really have evolved and am dependent on that grocery store?  Bet you are dependent on it too.

It is not just the food store that I am dependent on – what about my  internet – Like the advertisement on our TV – The guy gets mad and starts to throw things when his internet driven machine doesn’t close the drapes fast enough when he tells the machine to close his drapes – Satellite internet service is a requirement of our evolution!

Well this morning I went out my front door to watch SpaceX send 60 more satellites  skyward to improve my internet!  You see, important stuff is still happening – the internet is the new way of staying connected when social gatherings are discouraged  – We are lucky to have that new technology. Now, lets hope the grocery store stays open and stocked during this new Coronavirus outbreak.

I know my neighbors in Florida and on Drummond Island want to go back in time, but I am, also, sure they do not want to give up the grocery store. Oh, you say “How do I know they want to go back in time?”  I know because they keep images of prehistoric things in their lawns, driveways, and parking lots!  I’ll show you just three of them.

In both Drummond and Florida, I bike around and see this stuff.  I think about how it used to be – no, not just 80 years ago when my parents had a 2 acre garden, a barn full of cow manure to fertilize the garden, horses to pull the plow – but way back – back before the garden and before the internet talked to our drapes, … back to when getting food was a real dangerous chore every day.

Bottom line is this Coronavirus situation is real serious when it comes to getting food. Have you seen the empty shelves at the grocery store?  Purchasing food is very important to us now that we have evolved. But, so has our creativity evolved – We will figure out a way to enjoy our new world. But in the mean time I played around with my thoughts using photos and PhotoShop to tell my story:

Since the Coronavirus, I do not even want to go get my hair cut – I do not know if they sanitize the electric cutters – Mom used the kitchen scissors to  give me a hair cut 80 years ago but now I think I will be like Wilily Nelson  and grow a pony-tail.

I was thinking, what if our ancestors were creative – got new ideas – take a look.

That is how we humans evolved – Ideas on how to do new things, even, ideas on hair cuts, colored nails and all kinds of important things that we will find new ways to do   in this new Coronavirus world!