Before the rain, it is nice out there

Tree in front of elementary school

I walk by the Birchwood Elementary School when I head out for a trip to the bus, or to my favorite hiking trails in the neighborhood. I noticed this tree has developed long dangly things, and since it's only January, I figure they must not be those seed pods that give my nose such trouble in the springtime. But after looking online, I cannot tell what they might be. I am such a neophyte when it comes to identifying the wonderful flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest. 

One of the only things I know about trees around here is that there are deciduous trees (like this one, which loses its leaves in the fall) and evergreens, which keep their needles year round. I know the shape of maple and oak leaves when I see them on the ground underneath a tree, but I am embarrassed to say that's about it. Although I enjoy seeing the trees as they change during the seasons, I am really not very well versed on the differences between them. I'm sure there are plenty of my readers who can enlighten me, so I won't spend a lot of time googling.

Speaking of googling, I just read that the husband of the missing Massachusetts mother was asking Google how to dispose of a body. That served to remind me that all of my internet searches can be easily seen by those authorities who might be wondering why I am trying to research "long dangly things hanging from trees." Nothing online is safe from the prying eyes of the Law. That's a good thing, if you ask me, but then again I don't think I have to worry about my search history. Just a reminder to all those of you out there who forget we are not in a bubble but are completely exposed to the world by our phones, laptops, and other connected devices. 

My weather app has warned me that this lovely weather will not last, and some of the atmospheric river that is inundating California at the moment will be sending lots of rain to us, too. Just in time for my Thursday hike, it looks like. Fortunately I'll be ready to walk in it, even if it won't be my favorite thing to do, I'll probably manage to enjoy at least some of the day. As some wag once said, "there is no bad weather, just bad clothing." Although looking at the pictures of central California today, I think if I lived there, I'd stay inside.

:-)

Nice dry Saturday walk

Ladies taking in the view

Today I headed over to the meeting place to start our usual Saturday walk. Some were going to "go flat" while the others would hit the hills and make for a bit harder walk, but after hearing about the view of the falls, we all decided to stay away from the hills and see the falls instead.

Whatcom Falls today

Every time I've seen these falls lately, there has been even more water roaring under the bridge. But the good news is that we do have a few days ahead without any rain, and hopefully many of our flooding rivers can stay within their banks. It's really pretty, though, and quite exciting as well.

After the walk, Hubby and I went to the local Target store to change over from Verizon to Consumer Cellular. Many of my friends and family have already done this, and the difference they are paying in monthly bills was what finally pushed us to make the change. Although I want to buy one of those newest iPhones, I decided to wait to do that at a later time and just get the SIM cards switched out. It was relatively painless, because we had a good tech person to help us.

And now I look forward to saving money, too! Not to mention that we have more text and data than we did before, and should see a bill about a third of the amount we paid to our previous provider.

So now we're beginning to think about severing the link to cable, but I'm in no hurry to leap into that steep learning curve. We've got plenty of time to figure out the best way to do it. The world is changing right before our very eyes!
:-)

The Internet is changing everything

Oh, how the world is changing

My little grand-niece Alicia is proficient with her iPad at sixteen months. Unfortunately for her mother, this particular iPad is now toast, since Alicia decided to see if it would float in the bathtub. I just learned from my sister Norma Jean that Alicia already has a new one, this time with a waterproof case.

In many ways, I don't feel a huge need to dash down to Florida to visit my sister, since we talk every other week on FaceTime, and it's simply wonderful to sit down with this technology and have a good long face-to-face exchange. Phone calls aren't the same at all. How much I look forward to these visits!

I also do all of my banking online and don't even have a physical place nearby. The number of checks I write in one year is in the single digits; everything else is electronic. The only thing that bothers me is my complete dependency on the digital world and the internet. I surely do hope that the People In Charge (whoever they are) are also cognizant of our need to keep all this going.

Does it scare you? When Delta Airlines a few weeks ago lost their internet connection, things were chaotic for days. What would happen if it happened on a larger scale? Sometimes I think about things like this and really wish I wouldn't.
:-)

Netiquette

From The Free Dictionary

I had to laugh when I ran across this cartoon while looking for an appropriate image for this blog post about internet etiquette, now also known as netiquette. (I wrote a post about this topic back in 2010, and after re-reading it, I've found that things have changed quite a bit in that time.) That Wikipedia link now mostly addresses cellphone etiquette, rather than blogging etiquette. So it's time for a new post, as we are all netizens, and most of us have blogs of our own.

At least that's what I think as I read the comments left on each of my posts. I have almost 200 followers according to the Google link, and probably others signed up to follow this blog through the email link, which I provided upon the request of a frequent blogger. I follow almost a hundred blogs on The Old Reader, and several others by email. So there are definitely more than a hundred blogs that interest me enough to have any new posts written by any of you to come to my attention.

Fortunately for me, not everybody writes every day, and I don't comment on every post of the blogs I read; if something doesn't occur to me while reading it, I let it go. But I always read the comments that others leave on my blog, and comments left on other blogs (not always, but if the subject is of sufficient interest). I notice the same people who read and comment on my blog often comment on others I'm reading. It's a bit like seeing a note from a friend, and I'm rarely surprised by what is said, but sometimes I learn something new.

It's a rather intimate world, the blogosphere, wide open and somewhat personal at the same time. What prompted me to write this post is to ask whether my regular commenters expect a response from me. I know that many of you whom I follow respond to every comment, either online or privately. Not everybody gives me the option to reply privately, because if I try, some have not put their email out there, so I must go to their most recent post and type in a comment that answers the question.

Some people respond to each comment on line, but I rarely return to an already-read post because of time constraints. I will miss that published reply, unless I really feel the need to find a possible answer to a question I might have asked. What do you do?

Comments are important to me, since I get feedback and know whether or not the subject was of interest to my own personal netizens. But if your post did not require a comment, I might skip it, although I often let you know how much I enjoy your pictures, or learning about a new place, or about the recent events in your life, both bad and good. I've grown to care about so many of you who I will never lay eyes on, people who are as dear to me as family. Gosh, how did that happen? Whatever the reason, I'm glad it did.
:-)

Seeing faces everywhere

Pansy faces

Yes, I see faces everywhere I look. In old barns, in flowers like these scrunched-up pansy faces, anywhere that there are possible eyes and a mouth. Noses are not always necessary. That pansy looks to me like an old man with a moustache, or maybe a lion. There is a word for this tendency: pareidolia. (The link takes you to Wikipedia which explains more about it.)

I've always done it, and now that emoji (or emoticons) have become ubiquitous, there is even an Emojipedia page. That way, anybody who wants to find out the true meaning of that weird emoticon he or she received from a so-called friend, well, there it is.

And just this morning I learned about Japanese emojis, such as the shrug, also known as a kaomoji, because it's based on some Japanese characters. Here it is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and I find it interesting that it's taken off the way it has partly because (taken from The Atlantic):

The meaning of the “the shruggie” is always two, if not three- or four fold. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ represents nihilism, “bemused resignation,” and “a Zen-like tool to accept the chaos of universe.” It is Sisyphus in unicode. 

The world is definitely changing, isn't it?  I am certainly having fun with these new communication tools, and learning stuff to boot!
:-)

June is... well, you know

My front porch flower garden

Busting out all over, of course! Everywhere I look I see flowers in bloom, and today's sunshine will bring even more of them out. The roses are blooming everywhere, although I don't have any I certainly enjoy seeing and smelling them.

The community garden from my back porch

You can see our fenced-in community garden in this picture, surrounded by plenty of buttercups, which have become the bane of my gardening existence. They turn up everywhere and need to be rooted out at the first sign, or they take over. The garden is worth it, though.

One of my five broccoli florets, almost ready

In a day or two, I'll need to harvest the broccoli and steam it up. If you didn't know already, we also steam the leaves which are very good all by themselves, too. In the lower left is a volunteer borage plant that I'm allowing to stay for awhile. I love its pretty blue flowers.

Sugar snap peas climbing up the bamboo trellis

I thought I had plenty of room in my garden, but as you can see, the tomato plants will be climbing the same trellis as the peas, but gosh, I didn't realize how quickly everything would explode in size, and it's early June! I've got to wrap the peas with some twine to keep them growing in the right place.

Strawberries!

I just picked these and they were still warm from the sun when they went where all good strawberries belong. The slugs took at least this many, but soon there will be so many ripe ones I won't care. I took these pictures just minutes ago and was so pleased to see them appear like magic on my laptop, since I changed my settings so that the iCloud will have my iPhone photo stream appear on all my devices automatically. I just checked, and there they are on my iPad, too! Isn't technology wonderful?
:-)

Our electronic world

Gene with his Android tablet at the coffee shop

These days, when I walk into the coffee shop in the morning, I usually find my friend Gene sitting there with his tablet. He used to complain about me always being plugged into my iPad, but now it seems he's gotten the bug himself. He stopped carrying internet in his home, so he waits until he gets to the coffee shop and its WiFi before he reads his email and checks Facebook. Yes, even my Luddite friend Gene has a Facebook page now! Gone are the days when he would scoff at me for my addiction; he's right there with me. And now I have a Kindle Fire which seems to be taking the place of my beloved iPad. The apps for Android tablets (the Kindle Fire is in this category) are different from Apple apps, and I think I might be stuck with the two of them when I'm out and about until I find apps for all my favorite things.

I skipped my exercise class yesterday so that Smart Guy and I could be at the local Social Security Office when it opened. On Friday, we received our notification of benefits for 2014, and we both had some expenses that were unexplained and rather worrisome. They were the same on both of ours, an extra $80 out of each of our benefit amounts. That sort of adds up! We found that whatever the issue was, it had been cleared up by the time we got there. The clerk pulled up our accounts and saw that everything was as it should be, and NOT what had been printed out on our benefit letters.

She also explained that we could check our accounts ourselves at any time, if we wished to set up individual accounts with the SSA. I will do that, but not any time soon, since I'm still a bit shaken up by what happened and not quite ready to verify that she is correct. I won't receive my money until the middle of January, anyway. But what a shock it was. I lost sleep for a couple of nights over the weekend, wondering what was wrong. I slept just fine last night.

Now about that Kindle: I am enjoying it very much indeed. It's cheaper than the iPad mini I contemplated buying, and just the right size for reading books, reading my email when connected by WiFi, and reading websites, just as I do with my iPad. It's quick to respond and definitely a different beast than my iPad. Right now I'm engrossed in a book my sister Norma Jean told me about (a John Grisham novel, Sycamore Row). I've finished more than half of it and find myself being pulled back again and again. That would be just fine if I was traveling or something, but I had to put it down so I could get this post written. It will wait for me, just like any other book. I pretty much love my new toy.
:-)

A day without internet

It's been a long time since I've used a rotary dial phone like this one. I've grown so accustomed to being constantly and completely connected all the time, without wires. My cellphone is only turned off when hiking in the wilderness where coverage is spotty or nonexistent. With the move I'm going through right now, I will be a day without internet access, although I will still have my cellphone, so I won't be completely without connection. Plus if I need a fix I can always go into town and use some free internet.

It's actually possible that it won't be as bad as I fear, but I'm not optimistic. The move will culminate tomorrow, September 2, so I made arrangements with Comcast to make the switch. When I woke this morning and went to get online and read my blogs, email, and news, I got a message that I needed to activate my new account. To do that, I needed my account number. However, as I learned after more than an hour on the phone with an agent, when you move (even if it's just around the corner), you create a new account. And that number had not yet been assigned! Okay, what happens now? I was able to finally get a representative who managed to reconnect my new account to this address, but who knows what will happen tomorrow? Sigh. I've got a tech coming by sometime in the morning, but it's not clear to me whether he will be forced to create yet ANOTHER account with a new number. In the meantime, I figured I'd better say hello, read my blogs and email while I still can. More to come... sometime.

I long for a normal life again, and although I know it's coming somewhere in the near future (at least I hope so), I can barely sleep I'm so tired. By the middle of next week I'm hoping that I will have finished finding things again. (Where did I put my cellphone charger?)
:-)