It's a LOVEly Day

52 Years for Ma and Pa Love

It was a hot June day (95 degrees) when Bill and I, guided by Fr. M. John O'Donovan, exchanged our wedding vows at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Sandpoint on June 15, 1974.  

 

That day also marked my brother Kevin and his wife Joyce's sixth anniversary.  So, do the math:  they've been married 58 years.  Sending them congratulations on this day. 

Chris Pietsch, a former student who has since worked as a photographer for the Eugene Register Guard in Oregon for years, brought his camera for his first official photography gig. 

He took the wedding photos, and a few years later, after we had settled into our 10-acre farm on Great Northern Road with that big beautiful red barn and where our kids Willie and Annie grew up, Chris came by for a visit and set up the photo above. 

I must confess that the photo has been AI edited this morning in order to add color to the original black and white, taken by Chris. 

Chris still takes photos of us on his visits, and, lots of gray hairs later, we're still plugging along after 52 years of adventures and respect and love for each other.

Our kids are grown and doing well. We have since moved from the Great Northern Road farm to our beloved Lovestead here in Selle.  

We are blessed to have each other, to be in relatively good health for oldsters and to have accumulated more than half a century of meaningful and treasured memories. 

We're aren't exactly a Hollywood couple; in our unique way, we're much better than that in the "things that count" department. 

Happy Anniversary, Bill. 

Thanks to the wood splitter, Bill's winter supply is accumulating faster than usual. 

I'm calling these our "anniversary poppies."  

They popped out overnight and there are many more to come. 

Nice to see them appear in all their beauty on this day. 

Can't believe your eyes?

Neither can this expert who is paid to have his eyes distinguish between true or fake. 

from the New York Times Morning Newsletter

Hany Farid, the world’s leading expert in spotting deepfake images and video on the Internet, stopped trusting his own eyes.

Farid spends hours and hours on this work: watching videos, geolocating, seeking inconsistencies, doing math. It used to be that he was proud to discover the rare fake in a world of reality. Now it’s the opposite. And the deepfakes are slowly breaking him, Eli observed:

“I miss the days when it was a grainy video of a shark swimming up the street,” Farid said one night, as he sat on the back deck of his house with his wife, Emily Cooper. He put down his phone and poured a whiskey. “The technology is getting so good. It takes me to a dark place.”

“Because you can’t tell just by looking anymore?” Cooper asked.

“Because nobody can,” Farid said. “I don’t trust anything. Every image I see, I’m drawing lines for shadows and doing geometry in my head, trying to figure out what I’m looking at. It’s over. Within a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.”

“And then what? You give up? You retire?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

This segment offers something rather scary to think about. How many of us have already fallen for something that appears real but is really fake?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who worries about what our world is becoming and how we'll be able function on a day-to-day basis when we become aware that we can't believe anything we see or hear. 

Sounds like a potential absolute to be reckoned with.  If the experts are doubting themselves, whom can we trust to guide us?

While I was mowing lawn,  Bill was using the brush hog to mow some trails through the woods. 

The tall grass is not only wet in the morning, but it's also not always easy for enjoying a walk.