FREEZING RAIN WARNING IN EFFECT

Again. This is getting past the point of being funny. I am particularly annoyed with the whole thing because for the last week or so, and for some time in the future, I am family chauffeur, fire maker, cook and bottle washer. My husband, poor guy, has a pinched nerve in his back and is pretty well totally incapacitated. I think we got the bulk of the medical appointments over today, though, so we may be able to ride out the next day and a half (length of predicted weather inversion). We have plenty of food and good books and are not totally dependent on the electricity. Although, if the lines go down, I will have to run the generator too. Oh, joy.

The one thing this miserable series of warm fronts and freezing rain has done is to turn our local woods and roads into a spectacle. It looks like a Disney set for the Snow Queen - huge blobs of snow frozen to all the trees and fences, large and small. Lovely. And most of the inevitable breakage around here has been of small branches. Not nearly the damage of the '98 storm that took out 60% of the limbs of the maples in the sugar bush.

This is what the bush looked like last week, before the latest storm added another six inches of fluff.

In the meantime, I will get back to blogging as soon as I get the Christmas cards done - that is, I will if the ice does not bring down the Internet connection.

Oleo

My dashboard is back. I have no idea why this is so, but I am hoping the reason is that Blogger has fixed its glitch. I got here through Google Reader - I was looking through all the posts I missed over the Christmas rush and suddenly saw the Dashboard prompt where it should be. And voici. Or do I mean voila?

JG's 'Trail Cam' is still producing some amazing results, of which this one of the best.  The garbage pail contains deer ration.

I could crop the photo to remove the pail, if I could find my editing program. My computer seems to have eaten it and I haven't had the time or the patience to reload the whole suite.

I have, however, thrown away close to 2000 photographs to date. A good many of these were either doubles (triples, quadruples) or losing shots that should have been dumped immediately. I am feeling Noble. I am also feeling like an idiot - I had seventeen shots of a pileated woodpecker that landed across from the kitchen door. Fifteen were total losers, hints of bird seen through off focus leaves.

Second Resolution for 2012 - dump losing photos at once!

I am off to play with my new coffee making machine - it is almost a barista all on its own.

Downsizing - The Downside of Digital

Last evening and for all of this morning so far, I have been moving digital photos into the trash. The score for this morning is almost 400 photos gone forever. ( I am emptying the trash bin regularly, lest I regret and retrieve.) This is my New Year's Resolution for 2012: I resolve to stop keeping every last raw image that I have. It may take me all year to implement this seemingly simple decision.

Unless you are far more organized than I, you probably take a batch of photos, look through them, pick a few to use right away and leave the rest to be disposed of later. Alas that, for me, 'later' seldom if ever arrives. Even worse, I frequently sort through a 'raw' batch of photos, pick some out to edit, copy them and put them in another folder. Now I have two raw images and the edits (often several) of the same thing. Since I save all my photos in large format, I will shrink them to email them or post them and then I have raw images, edits and small versions, all of the same thing. I didn't realize just how messy this was until I started to use Picassa 3 and it sorted faces. Some shots of my daughters and granddaughter appear up to six times in the People Gallery. Oy.

This is not a new messy habit. I have boxes and albums of film and slides from the Time Before Digital and even more boxes of prints, mine, my mother's and my grandmother's. All stored away for a rainy day.  In duplicate and triplicate and worse. From the time I started to use digital cameras, I stored all the images on disks and have a very large album of these with cryptic comments on them. Dating them would have been just too easy.

I am going to sort all of this out this year.

With tears and sobs she sorted out those of the largest size,

Holding her pocket handkerchief before her streaming eyes.

And gaining a great deal of space on her hard drive in the process. Not to mention a glow of virtue and the ability to find a photo that she wants inside three hours.

Wish me luck.

It's That Time of Year

Merry Christmas Season, and best wishes for a happy New Year.

Blogger Help is No Help

I cannot access my dashboard except by a roundabout route. I get error bX-96hcvc when I try. This morning I deleted a blog. On Blogger Help several people report this error but get no answers. When I try to post a question on blogger Help myself, it will not let me post the question as it tells me I have too many characters in the box. Believe me, I have cut the report to the bare minimum and I count about a quarter of the characters they say I have. I do not understand what is going on, but, for me, Blogger Help is a complete loss.
Anyone else get this frustrated and switched to a different platform? AC, I know you did, but you are better at the tech stuff than I am. I am just about ready to try anyway.
Snarl.

As of December 4th, no help from Blogger. I am getting mighty annoyed about this.

Of Toes and Turkey Poop

Photo credit: Patricio Lorente

I just read a wonderful rant from a blogger I love, who complained that her house has it in for her. I advised her to make offerings to the household gods to set things right. In my younger days I spent a lot of time that probably could have been better used studying Latin as well as Roman literature and history. The Romans had a pantheon of gods, but the ones I loved were called Lares and Penates, the local and household gods, for which a shrine would be set up in the atrium or dining room and libations poured before dinners and during household festivals. After being properly propitiated, these household gods would make everything go well.

I need to burn a little incense to my own, as well as to the spirits that affect dogs and toes.

We have been dog sitting the YD's doodle. Mostly she is a very easy dog to look after, but she does have some strange attributes. The weirdest is that she is not much interested in food - often at her mealtime she will stroll slowly over to her dish after I set it down, sniff once and wander away back to her bed where she settles herself with a sigh that seems to indicate that the cuisine is lacking tonight. Again. All the dogs JG and I have ever had rushed their dish almost before it hit the floor, curled around my feed during any meal preparation and generally did a poor starving dog act at every opportunity. Not this dog. The YD buys her the most expensive and nutritious dog food available, her doggy treats are delicious liver slivers, and she, mostly, scorns it all.

She has been eating better during this visit and she does adore Milkbones. She also adores turkey poop and sniffs out every morsel she can find, either to eat or to roll in. Early this morning we had a big flock wander through he yard, twenty-five birds or thereabout, and I most unwarily let the [censored] dog out for a quick run just before JG was due to load her in the car to take her back to her mistress in the city. And, of course, she rolled in the nice, warm, smelly poop that the birds had left behind. I grabbed a brush and lots of wet wipes and tried to clean her up, there being no time left to wash her before JG had to depart, but I suspect that the truck window will have to be open as he drives the hour into the city. So, why is turkey poop better than premium dog food? Who knows.

What kind of incense should I be burning? Other than lots.

I hope the Penates do feet. I had to have an ingrown toenail removed on Tuesday last. This has happened before and always I have healed up very quickly and been able to resume full activity almost immediately. After one instance, I was out taking down tubing in the maple bush after two days, with no problems. This toe, however, is not behaving. It has swelled a bit and I am slushing around the house in a pair of overstretched and ancient sheepskin slippers. The only shoes I should be wearing are a pair of runners with a very high toe cap. But I have had to go out to appointments and meetings and I am too vain to go in pale blue slippers that scuff or runners that are usually used for hiking and look like it. So, the toe - middle one - rubs on my dress shoe and stays swollen.

I have a meeting this afternoon. Vanity and common sense are at war. Would the fact that the runners probably have turkey poop on the soles be a good enough reason not to wear them?

Thirty Second's Worth of Distance Run

I was never cut out to be the secretary of anything. Last night I wrote out a set of minutes (ten days after the meeting) for an organization where I am temporary secretary. I had them all done and was spell checking when the word processing program just, click, shut down. The document recovery feature gave me the first five lines when I used it. I went to bed both grumpy and puzzled. This morning I managed to recover a temp file with most of the material in it, re-saved in several formats and watched one format go pop again. Copied to a new document and that seemed to work. I proofed and sent it off in an email to the group. Without attaching the document. Luckily the organization is getting a new, better qualified, secretary next month. So all I have to do is tidy up the files I am using and pass them on. Whimper.

Almost seventy years of working at this sort of stuff has not made me good at it. I am not the right personality type at all. Give me an emergency deadline, hand me a bunch of posters or whatever to design, need something done in a hurry and I will come through. But the neat and tidy, precision stuff (unless it has to do with ems and hairline rule) is not my thing. I think you are born one way or the other. I have two daughters: one of whom is Ms Organized Precision; the other is your perfect example of adrenaline-charged Last Minute Mabel. They have been like this, both of them, from the moment they left the womb. If you kept the infant Ms Organized on a schedule, she was a happy, thriving child. Upset the schedule and she turned into Miss Hyde. The other daughter, hauled around a wet, windy Expo site at three months old, fed at weird intervals, forced to sleep in a bouncing backpack, was her cheerful self all through. Genes rule, I strongly believe. Nurture can only modify what Nature has created.

Not that my Very Organized mother did not try.

I get angry at myself from time to time, especially when I blow something. Especially when I have volunteered to do something that is not in my skill set and end up doing it badly. Sadly, experience does not teach me; I continue to take on stuff, to say yes to things that I really don't want to do, usually just to get them done when no one else is volunteering for the task. I have a fundraising event to run in the spring. If the event were to take place next week, I could just turn in and whack it together. But with several months' leeway on some of the tasks, what do you bet that I let them slide and end up running in circles in the last few days. Also, I don't delegate well. It almost always seems easier to do what needs to be done myself, rather than find someone, explain the task and monitor the results. Oh, well. At least I get to do all the posters and art work.

In the main, though, I manage to tolerate myself. There are things I am good at, that I do well. I hope there are enough of them to balance off the messes I occasionally make. To have patience with myself. Even to laugh at myself. Last night I was stamping around stewing at the computer and my own sloth. This morning I can be amused at the whole sorry mess. Especially since I did manage to recover enough of the job that I did not have to do it twice. Otherwise, I might still be sulking.