Leaderboard

When life is turbulent, I tend to look to the past for solace and comfort. I was thinking about when my mother was a switchboard operator in our small town telephone office. The photo from 1962 has her (standing, second from left) and the other ladies who worked there until the changeover to direct dial in that year. I can still recall their saying "Number please." Our phone numbers were simple. Ours was 108. The best one was No. 1. There were also "party lines" which had strange numbers like 33R12 which meant Ring one long, two short. The older pic shows the earlier office in the front room of the house of the man in the pic. He was the local manager. That house is across the street from where I lived and has been lived in by a good friend of mine for over 50 years. The original wiring still exists under the house! I wanted to use some colour in this l/o since nature here is only slowly gaining some vibrancy.

Not too bad. I have a plastic unit with many small drawers to hold parts. I will admit that all the drawers are full!

From the time I was very young, whenever any appliance or mechanical object was going to be thrown away, I took it apart and saved all the parts that I could. For instance, when my mother's reel-to-reel tape recorder that she'd had since high school stopped working, my sister and I bought her a more modern one, but which still used the same reels. I took apart the old recorder, saving springs, bolts, screws, spacer posts, the power cord, etc. Thirty years later, I needed a specific bolt with an uncommon thread. The one I found and used I recognized as being from that tape recorder. I also have old-time punched nails that I inherited when my grandfather died.

my mother was a switchboard operator in our small town telephone office. Ik dacht eerst dat men gezellig rond de piano zat, 😂 maar toen ik de foto wat vergrootte zag ik de oude telefooncentrales. 🎧

Thank you, Corrie. Because of the warm one day and cold the next, some of my daffodils haven't even bloomed yet. But, the ones that have bloomed are beautiful.

Over time, that must take a lot of space to keep all those bits and bobs!

Warm day, cold day. That's the way it's been here too! Mother Nature is struggling with picking a season.

Me, too. My family and I lived in Rutherford, New Jersey, and our phone number was Rutherford2-2032J. (The J indicated it was a party line.)

Julie, this is a lovely layout! The small details complement the stars of the page, which for me are always the photos.

Jaren en jaren geleden had ik de leuk fleurig gekleurde sandaaltjes van mijn tweeling bewaard. En warempel ik kreeg er nog een meisje bij. (ze inmiddels al bijna 50 jaar) Eindelijk paste ze na enige jaren. Dezelfde dag nog sprong er een bandje kapot maar ik dacht niet getreurd ik had immers 2 paar. maar ook die waren inmiddels vergaan denk ik. Dus pech hebben. Maar dat zal met goede yeans materiaal niet zo snel gebeuren denk ik.

I love the way you used that photo circle script and yourself in daffs are gorgeous!

I have two varieties of daffodils in my flower bed. The daffodils in the circle are pictures that I took of them in various sides. The center cluster is from Adobe Express. The bottom is a photo from my garden that I made into layers and merged in Photoshop, edged with one of Carole's edge brushes. The from is Carole's photo circle script. The side plaid is from an experiment in FF that turned out well. The font is from a CF and called Juicy Snap Solid. I made the daffodils from AE into a tube and created the pattern fill.