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.