Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.

Author Archives: dawnkinster


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A state funeral for a dad

The news has been so sad lately. Images of California neighborhoods fully engulfed in flames mixed with those of President Carter’s coffin being delivered to our nation’s capitol by a horse-drawn caisson. The lines of people solemnly passing by the coffin in the Rotunda. And, more privately, two different friends of mine learning to live without their own parents.

But this morning my husband and I watched the state funeral for our 39th President, and afterward I felt a little better. No, California isn’t better, the devastation there is beyond understanding, and my friends are still deep in grief, but watching the ceremony honoring President Carter took the edge off my sadness.

Not to say I didn’t cry a little bit during the service. The first tears fell when President Ford’s son, Steven, spoke. Before he began to read his dad’s eulogy for President Carter, he extended his heartfelt condolences to the “Carter children.” It seems back when his own dad died in 2006 the Carter kids offered his family support and comfort. Now he was returning the love.

I remember the funeral of President Ford, it was only a couple years after the funerals of my own parents. The pain on the faces of the Ford children was so intense and I knew, deep inside, what they were feeling. I wanted to hug them all and tell them they were not alone. And now here are the Carter children. Not children anymore by any means, but still grieving their dad a year after their mom. Heartbroken.

Most of the speakers caused me to shed a tear, each of them deeply touched by the life of Jimmy Carter. The grandchildren speaking made it clear that his legacy is in good hands, that the mission of making the world a better place will continue uninterrupted. Grandson Jason heads up the work, and spoke so movingly of his PawPaw, making us laugh and cry, just like, I’m sure, all the kids, grandkids and great-grands are doing tonight as they sit around telling stories after a long day sharing their Jimmy with all of us.

And one of the sweetest moments came toward the end while Garth Brooks and his wife Trisha Yearwood sang John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Somewhere in the middle of that quiet, gentle song the camera swung to President Biden who was singing along. “Some may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

So what was my big take-away from this celebration of love? That Jimmy Carter was a husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather and that he was a regular guy who wore shorts and crocs and struggled with his new fangled cell phone just like all of us.

For a couple of hours today I could forget about all the stuff going on in the world, in our country, in my part of the universe. For a couple of hours I could immerse myself in times long gone, remembering most of them, the celebrations, the grief, the wins, the losses.

I was reminded that we’ve been through hard times before and we made it to the other side. And I’m reassured that there are more good, regular people out there than we sometimes realize. And that most of us are just regular folks trying to do the best we can.

Just like President Carter did for the entirety of his 100 years.


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Happy New Year!

Penny here.

As you can see it’s already January 4th and mom hasn’t posted since Christmas! When I decided to adopt my parents I didn’t realize that I’d have to do everything around here!

Anyway, I didn’t want you all to think we aren’t thinking about you, and reading your blogs and stuff, so I hopped on here to bring you up to date. (OK. I just hopped on here cause I like the attention. I really have no idea what’s going on!)

My dog mom, me, and my dog mom’s bff.

All I know is that mom and dad had some stuff to do and they asked my breeder if I could go live with her for a few days and she (of course, cause she loves me) said yes!

In fact she said she would be more than happy to have me visit because she has a new puppy named Sarah, who is my niece, and she thought we might like to play together. And maybe then Sarah would quit bugging her mom to play all day.

This is my niece Sarah. She’s 6 months old and she’s a pistol!

Well! I am nothing if not willing to play all day!

And so, my breeder tells my mom, we did. All day, every day, for three whole days. It was sooooooo fun! That little Sarah is in high gear all the time! Sometimes even I had to jump up on the sofa and tell her to settle down.

But mostly we played.

Me and my dog mom on the sofa avoiding the puppy and checking if anyone had treats for us.

And when mom finally came and took me back home I fell asleep on my sofa next to my dad right away. And I slept all night too.

Yep…I don’t know what’s going on around here, but I hope they send me to visit Sarah again soon! I have great expectations for lots of fun in 2025! I think Sarah and I will be good friends. Even if I have to tell her off once in awhile.

Zonked out at home with my dad.

I hope you have a wonderful 2025 too.

Meanwhile I’ll try to get mom to take her blog responsibilities more serious. She says she’s still struggling with all the new stuff but she’ll try. I have less than high hopes that she’ll figure it all out.

My breeder trimmed my ears too, don’t I look GOOD?!

Well, I guess I’ll talk to you all later, I gotta go supervise the birds at my feeders. I don’t know what they did when I wasn’t here,

Your Auntie – girl, Penny.


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Wishing you a Warm Holiday

Many of you will be celebrating Christmas or Hanukah today.

Penny and our family want to send you warm holiday wishes today and for the rest of the year.

And we’re linking this post to Karma’s blog, where she challenges us all to post images of warmth. We can’t think of a better way to express that concept than by sharing the holidays with all of you.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, and thank you all so much for being part of our world. We’ll see you soon.


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When stuff doesn’t go right

I’m in another one of my funky, can’t figure out how to do stuff, phases. You know how it is (or maybe you don’t), you’re bee-bopping along doing stuff you’ve always done and suddenly something doesn’t click.

Sometimes literally.

Shooting through a window, with the glare of other windows reflected and struggling to focus.

Earlier this month I questioned whether I should print my blog, as a way to preserve it. Several of you had ideas, and others of you had wondered about their own blogs, so were following along.

Last week I wandered around the PixxiBook site, (thanks Linda!) a company that prints blogs into hard covered books with a really easy interface. They have options of choosing which posts you want to print, or you can choose a specific time period.

My issue is, and always will be, the size of my blog. I’ve been writing here since 2006, with over 3,300 posts. Still I was curious.

So, after a few days of thought, I put my URL into their ‘go ahead and try it’ box and it started to go to work. Pretty soon I could preview the results, and I enjoyed very much reading the first couple years of posts in the format the printed version would appear.

Back then I had no images, and the posts were shorter than my ramblings of today. It was fun to reread all about being in grad school as an older student.

Meanwhile the PixxiBook machine was still churning. When I finally backed out of the site several minutes later it had made it through 30% of my blog, indicated there would be 40+ books and the cost was edging up over $4,000.

I smiled, because obviously there’s no way I can ever afford to put my entire blog into hard covered books. It would be bigger than an encyclopedia set! But I will print a few years worth, perhaps those early days in school. And there is potential to just pull the Katie posts out and put them in one book, though I think that will take some work on my part.

Then, later in the week, I was working on a Christmas present, putting photos from a summer adventure into a photo book for someone and I was struggling!

Now, I’ve one projects like this a hundred times, but this time things felt different. I couldn’t find the book template I wanted to use, I couldn’t find the save button, though I remembered that while making my Penny 2025 calendar the system had saved on it’s own, so maybe that was it, I couldn’t get the photos imported…nothing was working the way I remembered it should work.

I spent a couple hours and got only a quarter of the book built when I had to stop for the day.

And, you guessed it, when I went back the next day nothing I had done had been saved. And I struggled all over again finding the pieces I needed to build the book. In the end I did the best I could and the book is designed and ordered and hopefully soon on it’s way to it’s forever home. But geeze.

AND during all this my Lightroom photo editing system decided I’d run out of storage. I have both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, which I pay a subscription for.

I’d always meant to use Lightroom Classic, because I don’t really want my photos to be stored by someone else in a cloud. But I accidently started with the cloud version, and I never wanted to stop and learn Lightroom Classic.

Franky, when I took the time to go explore Classic it seemed less intuitive and I couldn’t even figure out how to import a photo to it, so I stuck with the Cloud. But now my cloud is full and I really don’t want to pay more, especially with Classic sitting right there on my laptop. So I forced myself to figure it out.

And I’m slowly, very, very slowly, moving that way. I have edited the photos you see on this post using Classic. I’m not entirely happy.

And, speaking of not being happy, I have a new camera and I don’t have it all set up the way I want it yet. Because of course the new camera isn’t exactly like the old camera, otherwise, what would make it new.

Right?

So as I’m trying to take photos of this hawk that was hanging out on my deck and around my birdfeeders, terrorizing my little birds, I couldn’t get it to focus. That’s always been my problem with the Nikon Z series.

There’s a back of the camera focus button which I like to use v.s. using the shutter focus. I thought I had programed the camera to use the back button option, but while taking these photos, I’d focus using the back button, and when I actually pressed the shutter to get the shot it would REFOCUS and because there were so many branches it would focus on those instead of the bird.

Big sigh.

Lucky for me the hawk was concentrating on the little birds trapped in a briar bush below the deck and not me. He (or she) stood still for long periods of time. I finally just put the camera into manual focus and tried that way.

I still have to fix the focus problem, but that means figuring out more stuff. And I’m so tired of trying to figure stuff out these days. I might just go take a nap instead.

Here’s hoping you are having a much more productive and less frustrating month than I am!

No little birds were injured during the writing of this post.


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Who called me a wimp?

Penny here. Of course.

Now normally I wouldn’t be allowed back on mom’s blog so soon after my birthday post. That was only 10 days ago and mom likes to remind me that this is her blog and not mine and if I want a blog of my own I’m going to have to hire my own slave labor.

To celebrate my 2nd birthday mom took me to a fenced in dog place at a state park so I could run. We have only been there a couple of times and both times mom and I had the place to ourselves. I love to run and jump and generally act like a crazy girl so I enjoy it there a lot, even by myself.

But on my birthday, after mom and I were there just a few minutes, another couple showed up with their little terrier. I’ve already forgotten her name but she should have been named Hurricane. (Her name might have been Mandy.)

Cause she was!

She was a few months younger than me and, I hate to say it, she was faster than me! And she never stopped chasing me!

And then, while we were running around, another couple came by with their baby beagle who’s name was Toast. He was only 5 months old and he loved to run too! For awhile the terrier chased him, but he must have been boring, because she went back to chasing me, and let me tell you, I got exhausted!

I started asking everybody, even complete strangers, to pick me up!

Mom said I was a wimp, but picked me up and we sat at the picnic table while the two youngsters ran around. Then that terrier went right up on the table and landed on mom’s head! Well, mom said that was enough and we left to go home so I could get a birthday nap.

Now I’m rethinking asking mom for a playmate for Christmas. I might be a lucky dog after all, even as an only!

Signing off for now,

Your lure dog, Penny


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The great sock mystery

On this frigid Michigan morning, with high temperatures predicted to be in the mid teens (F) and wind chills below zero, I think it’s only appropriate to talk about socks. This is the kind of morning that I want to snuggle up on the sofa with comfy warm clothes under a blanket and my dog, and contemplate life’s mysteries.

Over the years I have purchased many warm socks. To my knowledge they all arrived in pairs, two of each pattern, color and style. But for many weeks I have only been able to find matching pairs on a handful of occasions. Unless there’s a huge pile of socks behind the dryer I suggest that my dog has hidden them on purpose.

This morning, with the wind blowing snow across the driveway, Penny and I head out into the dark to do her business. On my feet are mismatched socks. After all, who decided socks need to match anyway?

Penny agrees. What do you think?


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Bird watching

After a beautiful warm fall it’s finally getting cold now, cold like it’s supposed to be in Michigan in December.

We even got some snow, but nothing near what northern Michigan and the UP got. They had feet of snow fall in one day. We had a couple inches and they closed the local schools.

Why, I remember when I was a kid walking through 5 feet of snow uphill both ways to the bus stop. I’m sure you did too. Kids today.

Anyway, I haven’t done anything particularly interesting lately. Certainly nothing blog worthy.

Unless you count watching my birds as they swarm the feeders during these chilly mornings.

Sometimes we even have a bit of sun and then the birds are extra happy. I am happy too, enjoying the light on their feathers, and the sparkle in the snow.

I am hoping to get to my favorite birding park in the next week or so. We’ll see. It seems like every day fills up with things not going to the park related and I think….well tomorrow…and then tomorrow crazy happens all over again.

But if I ever do get out there I’ll share the photos. Cause there are bound to be some images blog worthy from out there.

Who you calling crazy, mom?

PS: Thank you to everybody that suggested ways to print my blog. I’m going to be doing some research!

PPS: And THANK YOU to everybody that donated to my fundraiser for the Truck Safety Coalition! I appreciate every one of you!


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Paper vs digital

I’ve been blogging since September 2006, when I was in grad school and a fellow student was putting together a host something or other to support people’s blogs. My first post was about writing an assignment for one of my classes.

I didn’t know what a blog was back then, but I liked to write, and I thought the blog would be a good place to put my thoughts about going back to school as a middle aged student. Now I read some of my oldest posts and think …. man, those were good (and sometimes bad) days.

It was all a new experience for me, being a student again, and I enjoyed almost all of it. Riding the city bus, hanging out with people half my age. Experiencing new things. Just being in Ann Arbor.

And then the blog morphed, especially after I graduated, and even more after I retired.

Now it’s more of a photo blog, a pet blog, a travel blog (when I’m lucky), a family blog. Sometimes a not anything in particular blog.

And here’s my dilemma. The blog is huge. There are months missing because when I transferred it to WordPress some months didn’t come on over…but overall it’s still huge. I pay a fee every year to keep it going because I’ve used so much storage. Someday I won’t pay that fee any more. Then what?

In library school we talked often about how technology is a double edged sword. That as it changes the ability to access the information changes. That we have paper documents and art from centuries ago, but someday soon people won’t be able to access things on floppy discs or thumb drives because there won’t be hardware left that anyone knows how to use.

Yet paper lives on.

I’m not thinking that stuff on my blog needs to be preserved for decades, but I would like to read it when I’m old, which is at least a couple decades from now. In particular I’d like to be able to read about Katie.

So I’m thinking about researching a way to print the blog posts about her. She was over 15 years old, so there are quite a few. If you remember, she was a prolific writer.

And if that works I might want to print the posts about going to school as a middle aged student. That was an extraordinary experience. There were fewer, if any, pictures in those, so they might transfer to some sort of paper document easier.

I don’t know.

I always have these ideas and then I get discouraged trying to figure out solutions. So if you’ve read my wandering words this far and you have knowledge of some way to print blog posts, let me know your ideas!