17 years and still plodding along.
I believe this is from New Years 1996 when we announced our engagement. Location: Olympia, WA. Person in the background: Auntie Janet. My cousin Bari is the one who introduced us. Didn’t my sweetie have fetching eyewear?
This is the Orleans end of the G-O Road. Back in the day it was going to be a logging road but construction was stopped when the tribes filed a lawsuit saying that the road was going to go through sacred lands and threatened their religious practices.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Court basically said, the road and timber harvest might be a bummer but wouldn’t force them to change their beliefs. It’s not a perfect analogy but it’s as if the government needed to build a bike path through the middle of a church with the argument that it wouldn’t force people to change their worship.
By the time the case concluded the lumber industry was bust and there was no reason to complete the road. So now it’s a lovely drive and handy for hunting and gathering.
This particular fire is out and was contained fairly quickly although Mom and Dad did pack a bunch of stuff in case they needed to get out of there quick. There are still major fires in the area and fire crews are busting ass to keep it all under control.
I take a million of the same picture every time I go to Orleans and now that I’m looking for before/after fire photos, I can’t seem to find good ones. How is that possible?
This is the same road, just around the turn.
Remember in December I bought this big giant bag of flour? Bob shook his head like I was crazy.
Today, the bag is finished.
Remember when I said that I take all my withered potatoes and bury them in the garden? Check it out. This isn’t even all of them yet.
How many times have you thought: I have a few minutes, I’m going to jump online to pay this bill, or print out this airline ticket and then next thing you know you are in some version of update hell waiting for things to download and then unpack and then load and then restart and before that can happen it wants you to update some other thing?
Yesterday I thought I’d do a streaming exercise class but I couldn’t get it to work. I tried every browser on my machine and then I figured it must be from when I updated my operating system. I spent the next 45 minutes making sure everything was up to date, uninstalling and reinstalling, dumping plug-ins, adding widgets, restarting my computer and on and on. I tried to stream via Netflix and got an error message so I did what that said. I looked in support forums. I finally went back to the class site and tried a different class: which worked fine. They’ve recently changed their interface so for whatever reason the class I wanted to take wouldn’t work. That was a stupid way to spend the morning.
The situation with my photos has become dire. I’ve always been lazy about the way I organize them but at least put them into folders with the date and event. I’ve got about a month’s worth that are just blobbed together with confusing duplicates and millions of pictures of pumpkins and dahlias. Every time I try to get a grip on it, I want to cry. So still no vacation photos or Reno photos.
Someone needs major tutorial action on the latest version of Photoshop. It took me about an hour to do this. In my defense I am a tad run down and my brain isn’t on full strength.
This was waiting for me when I returned home. It’s now on its velvet pillow in the kitchen awaiting a major life change. There’s one more close and I’m guessing I’m about two weeks away from inundation. I can’t wait.
I had a wonderful vacation in Orleans and the day we arrived home I had just enough time to clean up and then drive to the airport to get on a plane to go to a work trip. I arrived home from that last night and I put in most of a day at the office today and now I’m looking forward to some couch time.
Lots of great photos and possibly a few stories to come.
Back in December, I think, I decided to upgrade the operating system on my desktop computer. I bought a 171 page book to help me with this process and I have been working on it ever since.
Every step involved something that took anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 days. It was like: you need to go to this tiny village outside Lisbon to get something but if you can’t do that you can follow this guy on Twitter and the last Thursday of every month, he’ll give you the secret password that you can enter into a special website that you can only access during 2am and 3am in your time zone, once you get it you have to hop on one foot in front of your computer for 207 seconds while wearing a red hat and press shift-control-þ.
Now you’re done with step one.
If you don’t have a þ key, you need to go to Beijing …
I’m barely exaggerating here. Plus I could only work on it when I was stone sober and had all my brain cells operating on maximum which means I never worked on it after work or after a morning of writing.
I upgraded my ram. I learned out to do a proper back-up. I bought an external HD, utilities and widgets. I upgraded and uninstalled. I opened accounts and created passwords.
I finally finished this morning. I skipped a couple of post-installation steps (for now) because I could not bear to create one more username and super secure password. But I authorized and gave permission and near as I can tell: every account and device I ever have had in the history of history is now linked to every other account and device I have ever had. I’m still not sure what that means. There’s probably a guy in a basement somewhere draining my retirement account right this minute.
I’m still trying to learn how to keep a calendar on a computer. I am very fond of writing things down.
I received an alert about the Reserves game tomorrow on my desktop at the same time that my phone was ding-a-linging in the other room. Yay?
I killed all my old Adobe apps and downloaded the cloud thing. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to do these pictures in the latest iteration of Photoshop. I am working hard to bring all three of you loyal readers, the content to which you are accustomed.
Tomorrow is going to be a computer free day. I’ve got two soccer games in the next 24 hours. I’m going to do an hour of power in the yard. Everything is coming together. Finally.
There are only about 3 months out of the year when we have to worry about watering. And we don’t water our lawn, only the flowers and vegetables.
For the first half of the summer I enjoy it. It’s nice to be outside and wandering around looking at all the plants, checking out corners of the yard I don’t normally look at. And I always think: how could I ever get tired of doing this?
Then there’s the inevitable moment when I switch over to hating it. It always seems to happen in an instant and it happened last night.
Mostly it wears me down on the weeknights. Even to do a crappy job, it takes at least an hour and the traffic is worse in the summer so I get home later than usual. Then I’m rushing around and if anything looks even a tiny bit droopy I feel bad. I just transplanted my cucumber sprouts out there and they are all wilted in the dirt. Wimps.
I only water every other day unless it’s gruesomely hot. But I get all worried when I’m going to be home late and how to arrange my schedule to make sure I have time to do it.
The way the plumbing is outside, there is no way to set up an automatic system unless we open our wallets and get a few guys in here. Plus I think we’d have to tear the deck out in the back because the spigot is half under it. We just deal. It’s not that bad but last night it made me grumpy.
Meanwhile, my weather gadget says possibility of rain later this week and I felt bad being really excited about that.
