Mariyn's Photos - Dec 25 2025 - Hear the Bells

 

We won’t be hearing any bells on Christmas day in the east end of Grimsby.  Only one church - a recent Dutch Reform church - they are massive to serve a big community. All the churches that would have bells in Grimsby are downtown and west.  I asked which ones had bells and the AI retrieval told me that Barnabas Church has been converted into a brewery.  That would be the case in Grimsby, UK.  Too bad it isn’t in Grimsby, ON.  Our converted brewery is further east located in what was the Mapleview school building.  I don’t remember bells from childhood.  I wonder when bells would have rung out on Christmas Day.   My question takes me to a UK site to find an answer.  It says that in some churches in the UK, it is traditional that the largest bell in the church to be rung four times in the hour before midnight and then at midnight all the bells are rung in celebration.  This same site says that in Victorian times, it was very fashionable to go carol singing with small handbells to play the tune of the carol.  Sometimes there would only be the bells and no singing. Doesn’t that seem so interesting compared to our current systems of singing and instrument playing. Barnabas Church has popped up again.  Not the same one as in Grimsby, UK. It will ring on Christmas Day from 9:40 leading up to the start of the service at 10:00.  This is the only time allowed under national guidelines. That St. Barnabas is in Bromborough near Liverpool. We have a bell or two in Grimsby of historical note.  There is one located at the Grimsby Museum and is called the Town Bell - it originates from 1883 and was restored in 1966.  It rings in the New Year - to my surprise.  The second is in the Grimsby Beach Chautauqua community.  It was too large and heavy (it weighed 1577 pounds) for the top of the temple tent so had to be positioned in what became Bell Park on a wooden platform. The story continues: “This area of Grimsby Park had a bog hole causing the ground to be very damp. To eliminate the wet ground, the spring was damned up and drained into a heart-shaped moat. The drained centre became a beautiful flower garden and grassy area and was accessed by two wooden bridges built over the moat. It was large enough to hold many of the classes offered each summer as part of the programme of activities. Water grew scarce in later years and was drained into the lake. When H.H. Wylie bought the Park in 1910 the moat was filled.” This is NOT today’s view of the garden.  It is very pleasant showing the little tool shed with its stained glass windows.  Just like a church, I guess.  I should get a bell for the top.  When would one be ringing at garden bell?  I expect on the Solstices.

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Marilyn's Photos - Dec 24 2025 - Two Eves in the Year

 

Is this the case?  There are only two Eves that we celebrate - Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.  I guess Halloween could be considered an Eve since that’s the origin of its name, but then we don’t celebrate All Saints’ Day so it seems a remote example. There are a few we might have some awareness of - Easter Eve, if one is Catholic, is a day of vigilance and anticipation of the resurrection.  Twelfth Night and Epiphany Eve - January 5 or 6 are the final nights of the Twelve Days of Christmas, which we have gotten backwards in modern times.  Twelfth Night is better known as a Shakespearean play in my view. Here’s one:  if you live in Newfoundland, there is Tibb’s Eve on December 23rd - it is a party night. What makes us celebrate Christmas Eve?  It is the arrival of Santa Claus during the night?  That’s our current celebration.  One can read explanations of Bible passages that point to Christ being born at midnight. The passage is in Wisdom of Solomon 18 - the birth would occur when “the night in its swift course was half spent.” Doesn’t that sound Shakespearean - we’re back to the play again. New Year’s Eve commands a lot more attention in our times. It demands a countdown with a big arrival.  In the way-back time machine, it would have been sundown or sunrise.  We don’t have clocks to just sit around and count with them - tour magic began in 1884 when midnight became the official dividing line between days worldwide. Then New Year’s Eve took off. So today is the day that marks Christmas Eve.  I guess we should make the most of it, somehow.  We can’t decorate the tree - it has been up since November with the Fantasy of Trees and is on its second decoration theme. Feasts?  Early presents?  That’s the recommendation. I was at the Watering Can yesterday without Millie, and got asked at least 10 times by staff and visitors (yes, people go there often) “Where’s Millie?” I wanted to buy something and Millie is not one to wait patiently in a check-out line.  She pushes everyone out of the way and demands peanut pumpkin treats from the cashiers.  Here is a special Watering Can story - this sofa named Betsy.  She was there for years, and has been retired. There are replacements - very similar.   I was wondering what TASC is up to - it is a spring tulip display that is advertised as a tourist destination in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  I found a picture of what looked like Betsy in the field.  There are slight differences between my picture and the later two.  Betsy was renovated - the middle shot is from Facebook with the headline Betsy has a makeover.  I do suspect she got replaced in the middle shot, given the wood is natural and not painted.  Wonder where Betsy is for Christmas.

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Marilyn's Photos - Dec 23 2025 - Ditto

 

saw an ad on television and it showed a house with vast amounts of Christmas lights and decorations outside.  It then panned next door and the house had DITTO in lights and an arrow to the highly decorated house. When have you recently seen or used this word?  I haven’t used it for decades.  It is unclear it is even known by young people today. That seems to be confirmed by one of the questions under the definition:  “Do people actually say Ditto?” and the Answer is “Yes, the word “ditto” is a real word, and it is commonly used to indicate agreement or repetition - the date beside that is Nov 24, 2023.   One of the answers says that it “often carries a nostalgic feel from the pre-digital era of spirit duplicators. We knew them as mimeographs, gestetners, and ditto machines.  They died by the 1970s when photocopying took over. That’s a long time ago. Today Ditto seems to be used in names - Ditto Music, Ditto fashion, Ditto Words, a content design platform.   There are examples of ditto in a sentence and the dates are 1998, 2001 and 2007.   So back to this ad.  What was it doing using a word that is quickly moving into the obscure? Of course there’s an answer.  This witty, low0effort response often goes viral because of its relatable simplicity and clever compliment, making the “Ditto” house the unexpected star.   And what was that word of the year that applies? Slop. I started this Blossom Sun picture in the water colour class.  I finished it in Photoshop.  I am a much better painter with a mouse in my hand rather than a paintbrush.  There are many water colour techniques to learn.  For example, the crackly finish of the background is done by applying salt on wet paint.  The white flowers are created by waxing them with white crayons so that the colour of the sun doesn’t obscure them - white is a difficult colour in the watercolour world.

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Marilyn's Photos - Dec 21 2025 - Password to Heaven

 

Remember the “old days?” When passwords were an afterthought.  Compare that to now with double passwords, verifications, find the motorcycle, add up these numbers, and check that you are human.  What happened in between? There have always been passwords - it began with ancient military “watchwords” - remember Ali Baby and the Forty Thieves with Open Sesame.  Which made us children laugh tremendously.  Was it “Open sesame” or was it “Open says a me” - that’s the joke to us back then.  Supposedly it was about the sesame plant’s seed pod bursting open suddenly and dramatically when ripe, mimicking the cave door opening.  But passwords were for thieves and for the military, not for us. And so that was the case. In the 1960s when there was time-sharing mainframes, and more than one person wanted to use the computer, that’s the start of passwords.  From 1960 to 1962 is all it lasted and the first password theft occurred just two years after the first password started. The story goes that Alan Scheer, poor guy just trying to do the work on his PhD was given just four hours a week on the shared computer, definitely not enough.  So he printed the system’s password file and logged in as other users to get the work done.  He did share the password… oh oh.  There aren’t any details about his career after this. Of course it did mean better methods of creating and storing passwords with adding random characters to a stored password.  Another really big milestone was in 1988 when The Morris Worm infected 1 in 10 networked computers within 24 hours.  It was a ‘harmless”experiment, so it goes, but it inspired the beginnings of the profession of hacking.  Compared to Scheer, he got  convicted and 3 years probation and 400 hours community service.  He went on to be an MIT professor and well-known figure.  We are now in the land of breaches happening all the time, and fingerprints being used regularly for our entry to our computer and various systems. And that password to get into Heaven?  We can count on Forrest Gump for that one. When Forrest Gump reaches the pearly gates, St. Peter asks him for his password. Forrest immediately says, "1Forrest1". I was looking at my frosty pictures and wanted to make some infrared images which have a dreamy, frosty quality.  But I don’t have a camera that’s been converted to infrared.  Here’s what two samples look like, and then here’s my own version, done in Photoshop, following directions from an expert.

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