Wednesday, February 27th, 2019 —> -16˚C / +2˚F – dark & ‘clear’ @ 11:48 pm Atlantic Time.
– ‘Normal’ exposure/lighting – This afternoon’s web cam shot at 2 minutes to 4 pm. –
— When the sunlight hits the office window we get strange effects – even on normal settings for lighting/exposure with the web cam. Later you’ll see the even stranger effects when I pulled the exposure level all the back to severely under-exposed.
— Yes, Strange days. No matter what I did trying to sleep with pillow ramps, neck pillows, aspirin, etc. – I’ve been waking up with wicked headaches in the last week – Then, yesterday, even the aspirin didn’t work, so I tossed the long, thin bean bag heating pad into the micro-wave for two and a half minutes, and then another 30 seconds to get it warm enough, wrapped in a hand towel and made my pillow ramp as neat as I could and plopped down on the pillows with the neck pillow above the heating pad that I’d wrapped around my neck and watched a couple of episodes of ‘Escape To The Country’ – which is a BBC programme that people I care about in the ‘States’ might not be able to get – but anyway, I watched British TeeVee personalities/Real Estate knowledge-able if not licensed Real Estate Agents take prospective buyers who want to get away from the noise and the smoke and the traffic jams in the UK’s larger cities look at three houses in a more rural section of, “England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.” If nothing else I learn about the UK’s geography and get insights into customs, quirks, language differences and the like, and even got to hear, if not quite understand bits of Welsh, Cornish, and Scottish/Gaelic. And the houses are often very interesting – It would be fun to be able to magically transport some of those houses to a friendly area of Canada without needing to pay half a million pounds sterling for them – and pick and choose the landscape —> basically copy and paste some wonderful buildings – hopefully without any angry spirits – off in the woods somewhere under the radar and away from tax assessors? I can dream, right? – Anyway, I woke up after missing most of the third hour/ third programme recorded in our busy pvr {{{ I would much rather have a DVD recorder/burner and a stack of Blank record-able DVDs. — The way they’ve got things lately is a corporate rip-off and – as far as I’m concerned – an evil plot to encroach upon rights we supposedly have to record for private use anything we’ve already over-paid for with our cable/fiber optics subscription which probably illegally ignored their original agreement and began charging us something like three times what we agreed to pay when we signed up for this { #$W#%$#%#$#@$#@!@%**&^&^$ XXX !!! } { expletives translated into hieroglyphics…. } – their highly touted “Start again from the beginning” feature, if you tune in late will not let you fast forward through the commercials, and the commercials lately are sickening. }}}
— Uh, I woke up after snoozing through the third episode on the PVR without the splitting headach – Yay! and I kept the heating pad hot and in place for the rest of the day and into the night and woke up this morning without the usual splitting headache for the first time in I think, a week.
— But that’s not the only strange thing that’s happened lately.
— We had a snow storm that gave us maybe two inches of snow at the most, but then a snow plow came along and blocked the end of our driveway – maybe they cut into part of an aging snowbank just far enough to be the mean and nasty bullies they probably don’t realize they have become… *But* – by the time I got suited up and braved the elements, some wonderful neighbour of ours anonymously came along and used their own snow blower to clear the end of our driveway for us 🙂 –
— But then a couple days later – We had a snow storm that gave us something like eight hours of snow globe effect – that amounted to less than half an inch – But then, over night – dumped maybe 4 to 6 inches of heavy wet snow that nearly killed the snow-blower. The right half of the snowblower’s blade system got clogged and refused to work even after I unclogged it with the stupid special plastic tool that came with the snowblower – and then the left half chugged along at something like half its usual efficiency. — Schnarr! —
— And computers have been crashing on me left and right, downloading ‘updates’ I told it never to download without my permission and then crashing/freezing while trying to restart also without my permission. {{{ and then telling me I don’t have permission to attempt to restart it manually? So I pulled the plug and walked away, came back fifteen minutes later, plugged it in and hit the start button and it said, “Oh, it’s you, that’s what you wanted, of course -” and tried to pretend that nothing ever happened, but I had to go into settings and reset a couple arcane settings back to the way they were before the unwanted update decided that I really didn’t like my preferences, I wanted theirs????? GAAAAAAaaaaaa! & This didn’t just happen to one computer, it happened to three – {{ I’ve got two computers for working on my 3D inter-active game world – an older – 2008 vintage – iMac that I do a lot of writing and blogging on, a MacBook Pro that went back and forth to work with me last autumnand handles most of my photographic schnarr, an older Mac G5 that has programs that work magic that newer versions can’t do, and a Mac Mini that handles most of the email schnarr that comes in { 150 spam messages a day from ashley madison and stormy daniels and people who believe that somebody named Jim wants to have bigger boobs? or enhance my sexual prowess with probably anything but the real drugs they’re claiming I can get half price from them???? My spam filter either gives up or implodes after they cleverly miss-spell their subjects and/or change their originating email addresses and all that, and I’m probably lucky I haven’t died from the repetitive stress of my fingers hitting the delete key.} and not all of these computers are running all the time, but sometimes there are four or even five running at once if I’m intensely trying to do three or four things at once. }} Yup, that all falls under the heading of ‘weird computer schnarr’ – }}} Don’t ask about the iPhone that sometimes goes from fully charged to 97% over night and other times goes from fully charged to 54% in the same length of time.
— And I wish I could say that was the only weirdness we’ve had to cope with in the last couple weeks. I’m getting to the point where I want to scream and run away any time a politician from any country appears on a television screen. I wonder if future historians will call this, “The Age of WTF?” Has somebody dumped some really weird mind numbing chemicals into most people’s water or what?
– This is the same shot from the same web cam with the exposure slide pushed all the way to the left – I think it came out pretty cool and very blue…- let’s see if it shows up here too dark to appreciate. –
— Extremely under-exposed, the above second shot, two minutes before or after the normal shot at the top of this article, looks like a cool, but very strange moonscape with bits of normal earth trying to peak through from behind odd shadows. — hmmmmm —
~~~~~ Jim ~~~~~
