They warned us. All that snow we were walking through yesterday was going to be washed away by the time we woke up this morning. Their prediction was 100% true as it has been pouring rain all night and has not stopped. Here's the kicker though .. by late afternoon, the temps drop from 48° it is now at 8am to below freezing and all this rain will be mixed snow. The snow will not stick. I hate to write about the weather every day but it seems that is about all that is happening. Although in the background quite a bit of things have been happening ... not in life ... electronically.
Where should I start?
With the 5 pound bag of dog bones, grain-free with bacon flavor, gone ... it was time to buy more. That is only a half mile drive to the hardware store that carries dog food and dog treats. It's 4-star rated food and produced by the same company that produces Earthborn dog food. Stella had shown no signs of trying to escape the past few weeks when I have gone grocery shopping. I am usually gone for an hour and half on those trips. Yet it would have been hard for me to tell because I was still using the cord system, backed up with a baby gate. When I would return from those trips I'd check the door handle inside the bedroom for bloodhound drool ... there wasn't any. There wasn't any yesterday either but she opened the door someway.
No, I did not have the cord tied from that door knob to a closet door knob. I wanted to see what would happen so I just closed the door and put the baby gate up just in case. That was a good idea because when I returned ten minutes later, she had opened the door and is standing on her rear legs chewing the top of the baby gate. She didn't even stop when I walked in ... I yelled "hey" and then she stopped.
It has been suggested by others and what I've read, to install a deadbolt. I can do that and have thought about that many times. Especially every time I come home and she has that door open. Something always holds me back from doing that ... it's the "what if" thoughts I have. What if I install a deadbolt and she then tries digging through the door itself? It's a typical hollow interior door, easily replaced if damaged. You might think that is not a possibility but the time I spent repairing the drywall right next to that door in 2015 would prove otherwise. I hate the thought of having to replace a door just because she wants to get out for some reason.
No ... I did not leave her during anytime that she would have been fed lunch. It's just her. It's her DNA and exactly who she is, as the previous owner told me "she is an escape artist, NOTHING, keeps her contained." Those words haunt me three years and five months later.
I mentioned a few weeks ago I was having problems with the Wordpress dashboard at Wordpress .com using major amounts of data unexpectedly. Their support team suggested I use the 'old' wp-admin dashboard for everything. They did not tell me at the time they were redesigning the newer dashboard. When I say major amounts of data, I'm talking 700Mb - 1.5Gb just like that. Well over time I'd check the regular, newer dashboard and it seemed like things had settled down.
Until yesterday.
I was hovering around 140Mb of data usage for the first three hours I was online, after 8:30am. I glanced to my right at the 'Activity Monitor' to see Data Received at 974Mb ... Google Chrome was the browser. I checked their Data Saver which lists all activity from the most data used down to the least amount used, by name. There was Wordpress .com at the top of the list. So who knows and really, who cares. I'll keep using their older wp-admin dashboard. Like I have said many times before, I can't afford to lose 1Gb of data when I pay for 20Gb per month.
Two years ago the farmer hauled in and installed some of the largest black drainage system in that area of standing water. It's just like the same stuff we would buy in a 6" diameter. His looked like it had a diameter of 10 feet !!
At least I was able to install the new Apple iOS and MacOS updates this morning on my 'free' data period since it was before 8am. I like doing those updates mostly for security. They might include a lot of features, many that I don't or will never use but they always plug holes and tighten their security with those updates. You would be surprised how many friends contact me at times with computer problems, phone or tablet problems and the first question I ask is ... "When did you do your last update?"In almost all cases ... they had missed the last 2-3 Operating System updates whether it was Apple devices or Windows. Doing those updates when they come out fixes a lot of problems you might be having.
I know many of you wish I'd get off this camera subject. The one I bought on January 2nd and it arrived on January 4th. I did a lot of research about that camera. I read reviews from professional camera websites, read the forum for that specific Canon camera and talked to a friend that had bought that camera and raved about it. I was still hesitant right up until the time I clicked that purchase button on my computer. For years I've wondered if it was my eyes getting older and why weren't the photos from my Nikon D3200 as sharp as they were when I bought the camera in 2015 (?) Then when I would look at the sharp clear photos taken with my iPhone 8+, that made me wonder even more. A reader explained to me it was the humidity in my tropical air that was causing the problem based on his experience ... the same thing. Just slightly not as sharp and crisp as they should be.
So yesterday I did some more looking online and found a website that does reviews, listed first after my search. I had been on this website before I bought the camera. When I checked my bookmarks in my Camera folder, I had not seen this exact page that gave me the answer I was looking for. I am NOT crazy ... LOL. There were many others making comments on this review with the same complaints I was having. BUT ... the review itself pointed out the problem and why I will NEVER get the kind of picture I want with this camera.
It's the lens.
Sure it's a great feature to have a small digital camera with a 1" sensor, only a few cameras have a sensor that big. That great feature still will not override what they called "a soft lens." The Canon G9 X Mark II will never take sharp pictures of Stella far away, like yesterday morning's photos. The review said it would not even take sharp pictures of landscapes, even after shooting in automatic mode or manual with adjusted sharpness and fineness tweaked. I've made those setting adjustments the review suggested and have taken a few photos late yesterday afternoon inside and outside. I plan on taking more today when the skies brighten up. Right now at 8:39am it is dark, overcast and raining.
I knew before I bought the camera the max zoom was 84mm ... I found that even shooting at that range was not a sharp image. Before I bought the camera I set my Nikon lens at 70mm as a test and tried taking my long distance photos of Stella with that range while on the walk. I guess I need to learn and practice using a shorter zoom distance, then cropping the photos to the larger size I want. That is something I have rarely done but I did it with Stella's picture at the bottom of this page.
So my brain cells were scrambling again about the camera. I know that sounds stupid as hell but that is just the way I am. I admit I post a lot crap quality pictures on this blog, meaning slightly out of focus sometimes. Or not as sharp and clear as I want. That may not bother you but it does me. I only read this blog on my phone when I check to see how it looks to phone readers. Same way with my tablet. I might read the blog from my laptop but those times are few and far between. I do all of my writing, photo editing and reading on a 27" monitor. So my photos will look different from what you see on a phone or a table, maybe even a laptop. Everyone has a different device they are using so what I might be complaining about is not seen by you.
Interesting isn't it?
I am not sure how many of you have blogs or do blog. Those that do might be able to relate to what I am going to say. I've had a couple of online friends that do blog remind me that "this is your blog, you are writing for you, traffic means nothing." I answer to them saying I am not writing just for me because if I were, then I would have continued to write on my private blog like I do here. Using the blog as a documented journal to be looked at in the future as a reference or good memories. So since I am writing for readers mostly or posting photos for them to see, I try to put good stuff online.
Who knows what the reasons are but I am sure that other bloggers know ... there is something addicting about seeing your traffic statistics that Blogger or WordPress provides all bloggers. Are high traffic numbers fulfilling a hidden need our personalities need for acceptance or is like what I call the "Facebook Syndrome" of "look at me, look what I am doing, look where I am, look what I did" ... Of course with a lot of blog traffic that means you need more server space and luckily Blogger and WordPress furnishes server space. If this were an independent website I would have to pay more for that server space to handle large amounts of visitors. So that is not really something I like with average blog traffic.
I don't get anything near what other bloggers get in traffic numbers. I have a boring topic. I don't have a lot of emergencies, or crises to write about. I don't travel. Plus my daily photos don't change much in location or even how the hounds look. So I get it. No way am I going to get thousands of blog visitors everyday. That's good in a way because I don't get recognized when I am traveling or walking down the street like some do, nor do I have people knocking on my door to visit the hounds. I am a 'small time' blogger with small amounts of traffic.
What I am leading up to is ... it just makes me wonder out of curiosity how in one day after 44 days of consistent blog traffic ... it decreases 60% from the daily average.
In the meantime, Stella drank her water at the normal time of day, thinking we are walking. We aren't going anywhere. I'll put on a jacket and take some photos outside of what we are looking at to cause the cancellation for this morning's walk. The field will be nothing more than a pond if we were to walk through the wet grass today. I have standing water in the driveway and in back ... that means the field is even worse with water levels. Plus there are strong winds.
I left her inside as I went outside to take the pictures of the field and standing water. An hour ago there was much much more water standing than what you see in those pictures. The start of the path looks like it is close to having standing water on top of the leaves. Based on experience, the further we walk into the field as the elevation increases so does the water level.
This is the response that Stella gave me when I told her the walk was cancelled for this morning. "We might go out this afternoon." ...
It might sound like strange weather but this "yoyo" weather is normal winter weather for 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.
