Month: December 2018

— Puppy Photos that Jim Couldn’t Find —

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Monday, December 17th, 2018 —  -1°C / +29°F —> With grey skies andvery fine, almost invisible snow falling on the south side of Freddy Beach in Atlantic Canada @ 2:34 pm Atlantic Time —

— Ah, Jim – I feel for you guys, damn – { And thanks for suggesting I use this user account }

— Here are two photos from the facebook page that I was able to copy and save for you — I can imagine you wouldn’t be able to see to type. That ‘puppy horse’ had more personality than —> oh well, instead of ‘dissing’ people who might recognize themselves and feel bad or angry, let me just say he had one heckuva lotta personality. <—

Cathi & Jassper witj stuffed squeaking duck

– I’ve been told that it took Jassper less than a week to ‘love that duck to death’ & then he carried a piece of the ear around with him until Cathi found it unattended and was able to get rid of it – That’s Cathi on the couch hugging Jassper who is showing off his duck. Jim took the photo.-

— The duck squeaked, They had no trouble knowing where Jassper and his duck were until he shredded the duck a couple days after this photo was taken.

Jassper with bone in Arnprior.

-Here we can all see how much personality this guy had.-

— I believe Jim told me that Jassper dropped his bone when he came inside and some animal stole it – Jassper went to the spot where he dropped it and seemed lost until Jim came out, felt terrible and played with him. Jassper played “Kangaroo Dog” and tried to invent a “Kangaroo Dog Dance” that had me busting up with laughter. Then he’d smile at me – I swear that guy could read minds.

 

Jassper with blue bandana on porch in Arnprior

-Jassper being ‘terminally cute’ wearing his blue bandana on their porch in Arnprior – before they moved to New Brunswick. He still had a lot of his puppy-ness as I think Jim told me this was just before Jassper’s first birthday. He was born in July, they gave him my birthday – well actually they gave him Erin’s but I had it first 😉 –

— I know it’s real hard to think about celebrating a life that was much too short. I heard Jim moan that all pets should be immortal too often to guess that he could take this in stride. He didn’t ask me to do this, post these photos, but I’m pretty sure he and Cathi would appreciate me making the effort they’re too shaken to attempt right now.

— H.J. d’A — {Using the Jassper account until I can find my stupid passwords.}

— on the passing of a pet —

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Monday, December 17th, 2018 —> -2˚C / +27˚F – dark and cloudy @ 4:39 am.

Jassper Dancing With Cathi

– Jassper dancing with Cathi during a Doctor Who special on the ‘Space Channel’ in Canada. –

— Our puppy went bounding off into the spirit realm at about 3:30 am Saturday morning without a whimper.

Jassper rearranging the blankets

– “What??? You thought the queen sized bed wasn’t big enough for the three of us? See, all I had to do was rearrange the blankets for you – Now you can curl up there and Cathi can have that side and I get this part? Right?” –

— I’ve got some cuter than heck puppy pictures that my eyes are too wet to search for right now, but for now the two above will more than set the stage —

—  Any pet can be a close family member. You really can’t measure how much pure love and joy they give you.

— I remember reading in a post office propaganda ‘informational newsletter’ type magazine – they posted an article about the events in a life that deliver the most health threatening stress to anyone. The jerks that wrote that article wanted to impress upon us the idea that having a conflict with a supervisor was more stressful than it was worth – So of course we should ‘bite the bullet’ and take any of their b.s. egotistical/economic warfare orders in stride and do as we were told without question.

— But more stressful than arguing with a supervisor was the death of a family member and especially a spouse.

— One discussion I remember with a Yoga Master touched on the idea that ‘friendship’ was a higher form of love than romantic love. { You don’t expect your friends to take out your garbage, cook your meals a certain way at a certain time, complete all sorts of chores you don’t particularly enjoy without you asking – and if a friend tells a woman that a dress she thought was the height of fashion or extraordinarily beautiful didn’t look that good on her that wouldn’t cause as much of a melt-down as a spouse taking one look at her in that dress and laughing or saying, “What were you thinking? That makes you look like you gained thirty pounds and aged ten years.” Friends can tell you things you wouldn’t want to hear from a lover. }

— So maybe a pet isn’t as important in your life as your spouse or life partner, but they’re danged close – and when they’re suddenly not there any more and that incredible source of love and companionship is suddenly gone… – man! that can rip you inside out.

— But the universe hates a vacuum – and it is a real spiritual law that when one loved one leaves your life – another one will step in and not fill that void exactly, but bring a new source of love and inspiration to you. — Can I quote Tom Petty? ‘The waiting is the hardest part.’

— I’ve been deep in the twilight zone for a couple days, too deep to function on any usual level. I had a very strong impression that Jassper came to see me shortly after he made the initial stages of his transition to his next stage in life and didn’t understand why he didn’t feel the same when he jabbed me in my elbow with his nose. He was happy that his arthritis wasn’t bothering him, and I think he wanted to go for a walk up and down the street the way we used to before his Labrador Retriever health quirks twisted his hips out of their normal configuration. I had to tell him he’d graduated to a higher level and could now go bounding off to new worlds and find his mother and brothers and sisters and a whole new huge extended family in the happy puppy romping grounds. — He perked up and took off to try that out. He’s still out there romping, barking ecstatically at anything and everything who’ll pay attention to him over there.

— And we’re still back here in the material world crying our eyes out, wondering why we’re not greeted by a happily wagging tail and a look that wants to know if we brought him anything to eat.

 

🙁

~~~~~ Jim

— After a Week in Limbo – We Have Our Van Back & It Works! —

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Thursday, December 6th, 2018 — -15˚C / +4˚F – dark with a few clouds @ 5:36 am in Atlantic Canada —

I have some catching up to do.

Photo of desktop during migration

– Final Steps = Migrating User Accounts & Apps & files to new Internal SDD drive on iMac –

— I did some deep surgery on my iMac to replace a second cooked internal Hard Drive with an ‘SDD’ internal Hard Drive in an adapeter made for this make and model of this 2008 or 2009 iMac. The operation was a bit intense and described as “Not for the faint of heart” and “Involved”.

 

Glass panelon pillow

– iMac Glass Panel Removed and set aside –

— I had to get some specially designed & manufactured suction cups to lift the Glass Panel away from the magnets that help hold it in place in the front of the iMac. Instructions said to carefully set it aside, so I placed it, leaning against the pillow that was part of one of Mom’s favorite pillow and blanket sets – that she told me to take with me when I came to Canada because she didn’t have room to bring one more thing back to Alaska with her when she went back to live with my sister Sharon & her family – in June of 2002.

 

iMac Sedated on Soft Enough Balnket.

– “Now lay your iMac on a flat, soft surface” –

— In the lower left corner, that’s a set of specialized tools, 3 of which I needed to remove specialized screws from the iMac – the tools were not that expensive and came from the same company I got the SDD drive and adapter from { Other World Computing 🙂 }. You may be able to see that the door over the RAM chips – directly beneath the black apple on the iMac – was actually the first thing I had to remove and set aside. The iMac does look a bit strange without its glass front panel.

 

Next Step in operation.

– With the ‘bezel’ that holds the LCD screen in place removed, the microphone unplugged – and the LCD screen comfortably sedated over near the glass panel – this is what things looked like –

— okay, ya caught me, My flat soft surface was a queen sized bed with a clean gold coloured quilt folded in half on the iMac side of the bed. Bunches of odd screws are separated and in some cases wrapped in plastic sleeves – with their special tools wrapped with them. The cover to the RAM chip compartment is to the right, near the lower right corner of the iMac, next to the philips head screw driver I needed to unscrew that cover. The ‘bezel’ is the frame-like thing above rest of the iMac.

 

iMac Without Hard Drive

– Close-Up on the ‘guts’ of the iMac without its hard-drive. –

— The silver shining through in the upper near-center { a bit to the right of center? } is the spot where the old { Slightly Cooked } Hard Drive used to live.

 

SDD & Adapter in place

– Almost finished – The new Solid State Drive in its adapter is now in place and connected where the old Hard Drive used to hang out –

— The microphone cable { not connected yet } is sticking up above the iMac as the new drive is in place. I still had to vacuum a tiny bit of dust out and reconnect the microphone, make sure the iSight Camera in the center of the top of the iMac was lined up correctly, then carefully put everything back together and hold my breath while I carried the thing back into my ‘office’ – plug everything back together and press the ‘on’ button.

— I learned that I couldn’t just copy everything from a current external hard drive, including the latest operating system this computer can use —> onto the new drive, but I could install OS X 10.6 from my install DVD ( Canadian French Version 🙂 ) – then ‘migrate’ a couple User Accounts from an attached FireWire External Hard Drive – and then potentially upgrade later, or keep the older version of the operating system – which has a couple applications that became less user-friendly in their later versions… and still have a boatload of cool stuff on that drive.

— And That would bring us to the photo of the migration assistant telling me it had another 5 hours and something to go, copying schnarr from the external hard drive onto the new internal SSD drive – And I checked the iSight Camera as soon as I could, and yes, I managed to get that lined up right, still haven’t tried to do any video chat with anybody to see if I got the microphone connected and kink-free enough to function correctly. but …. 🙂 🙂 🙂 – Yay! It works like a charm – much better than it did before I crossed my fingers, said a couple prayers and, ‘damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead’ – but, but – slowed down enough to run back and forth from the in-depth tutorial from Other World Computing – and hey, in spirit – I’m still doing a happy dance.

— Enough for now?

~~~~~ Jim