Category: – Kvetching Toward Sanity? –

It’s been a weird couple days & I couldn’t wish a couple lovable people happy birthdays on time.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, February 27th, 2019 —>  -16˚C / +2˚F – dark & ‘clear’ @ 11:48 pm Atlantic Time.

Web Cam set on normal exposure

– ‘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?

under-exposed web cam shot

– 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 ~~~~~

— on the passing of a pet —

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

Waiting For the Next Political Bombshells to Drop & Checking Up On In Game Avatars —

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday – November 19th, 2018 – -6˚C / +21˚F – Grey & damp & cloudy @ 2 pm in Atlantic Canada –

Web Cam shot of shed & wood shed

Grey calm between Storms? Web Cam shot @ 12:53 pm -Monday, November 19th, 2018

— The weather applet said it was -19˚C / -3˚F earlier this morning.

— I’ve been busy lately, had a temporary job taking photographs of artifacts at the local museum ( Not Quite finished yet & there’s so much to do there that they may never catch up  )

— Maternity wards at a couple hospitals in Northern New Brunswick have been telling women close to their due date to plan on going to the next nearest hospital due to a nursing shortage. This morning on the radio our favourite early morning host interviewed a woman who is qualified to do the job but she’s bogged down, tied up in red tape – And she says the problem is not a nursing shortage it’s the greedy hospitals not wanting to hire full time nurses so they don’t have to pay them with benefits that is driving nurses to other provinces. My Registered Nurse step daughter can confirm that. She’s in Ontario where the same problem persists –

— Friends up here want to know if US citizens really are mean and rotten enough to whole heartedly support someone like Donald J Trump.  — Um, DJT might look good and resonate with those who have been manipulated and battered by constant propaganda to keep them anxious, insecure and worried that they just might lose everything. Scared off center type people who might be willing to believe that terrorists or refugees might just cost them their jobs could easily never notice the ‘beedy grastards’ behind the curtains pulling their strings and undermining the economy by making sure that almost nobody gets paid what they’re worth. Forensic economists are being labeled conspiracy theorists if they try to explain what is actually going on. Taxes just might comprise one third of the income stream at all levels of Western Governments ( and I do mean Federal, regional- State or Provincial, County, and municipal. ) And more than one investment counselor is telling us that all levels of government can right now stop collecting taxes and start delivering more and better services and if they stop trying to point the fingers of blame at any disenfranchised minority group while they’re fleecing honest ‘tax payers’ – this world would be a whole lot more relaxed, more fun and more livable –

— Sigh — How about a chorus of “When will they ever learn? When will they *EVER* learn?” —  Sadly, things may never get better until the average man in the street learns what has been going on since World War Two and becomes so enraged that the perpetrators will be hacked to pieces in way too many towns, cities, Legislatures and basically – every seat of government. The rumours in the ‘psychic’ zone tell us that something nasty will happen between U.S. Thanksgiving and Christmas – But this time it looks like the ‘rogue military’ strategists plotting this false flag operation will be traced back to the slime balls who actually call the shots and then there just might be fighting in the streets. Please tell me we can avoid this nonsense and just lock the sleaze balls up somewhere where their gruesome deaths won’t scar the minds of innocent children and mess up several generations of innocent, honest human beings.

Rachel the builder

“Rachel” – Rachel Otterson’s Avatar – hanging out near a shrine in Easlynne.

— Rachel – above – { & I included a lot of stuff I usually crop out of these screen shots } – in the area of the game we’re building that she inspired and did a lot of work ‘world-building’ to give the area the look she wanted. Pastel clouds through much of the game days – Purple clouds through much of the nights – & no – she didn’t get the purple clouds to match the temporary highlights in her hair. That was me, and it earned me a laugh and “gotta love it!” the last time we connected through land line telephones.

Rachel up close.

Rachel, cropped to 1440 x 654 pixels. { She spent hours trying to get her avatar/building character to look like her. – Then deleted that character and started over. This version looks less serious and more playful? }

— Near the end of last summer we had a ‘growth spurt’ and ‘built’ and stitched together several new areas. Nobody did all the work in any one area. There were a couple times when Rachel was ready to scream or fall down and cry because she couldn’t get the colour of the water just right or the clouds that were supposed to be light blue showed up on her monitor more like purple blue – so she called me up and roared that this software was ‘friggin useless’ and let me try a few things and together we got this area to look almost as good as what she’d visualized before knocking herself out here. I’m impressed. But she’s a perfectionist and might never be satisfied.

Rachel and Laerry.

– Rachel and Laerry – Rachel tried to design Laerry to look more like her husband – whose name is not Laerry – she was happy with the half-elf look, the ears do not stick out something like a foot from the sides of his head. – But Laerry Didn’t want to look like Derrick – and after she saved all the changes and thought she’d pretty much captured the essence – The next time she saw Laerry, { she ‘created’ him on somebody else’s computer, so she and her husband could hang out together on-line } – and the person whose computer she’d done this on swears on stacks of Bibles that she didn’t touch his character files. – He looks, “way too much like some California surfer dude-” But she laughed, “Okay, so maybe this is Derrick’s crazy cousin or something…” And said, “Let’s keep him anyway… I don’t want to kill this character.”

— Those weird shiny things they’re carrying – the ‘gear axes’ – are something that only builder characters get – Builder characters are the ones who can create and modify land masses to build the geology and add  plant ‘life’ – control the weather –  make it rain – turn the sky yellow or brown or pink or purple or orange or black….. or whatever – ( and get to wander around the game world with those silly gear axes. ) I don’t think they can actually drop or ‘unready weapon’/ get rid of those things.

— Yeah, so it’s much more fun to design and edit game worlds than pay attention to the news lately….

{ Schnarr – }

~~~~~ Jim

Sunday, August 19th, 2018 —> Earthquake Map of the Last 24 Hours?

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, August 19th, 2018 —> +23˚C / +73˚F – cloudy with some sunshine getting trough in Atlantic Canada at 2:07 pm Atlantic Time —> Today is my old neighbour, Bill Clinton’s Birthday – yes, THAT Bill Clinton —

map

Not the most colourful map I’ve seen lately, but this is the USGS map of earthquakes over 2.5 magnitude in the past 24 hours… I think…

— The red dot in Indonesia is the one I’m most worried about – It’s listed as a 6.9 magnitude quake and it’s the third quake within 20 hours – & one or two days ago there was a 6.0 quake in South or Central America. I’m trying to multitask right now – so if I stop and look it up I might not get any of my many projects on today’s ‘to do’ list accomplished. Maybe later I’ll come back here and edit that information in… it is pertinent. I’m trying to remember which student of Earth Changes told us that the best information he had was that a chain of Earthquakes at 6.0 and greater would begin in Japan and work around counter-clockwise all the way around the ‘ring of fire’ and when that chain of earthquakes reached San Francisco, that would be the ‘Big One’ everybody’s been dreading, predicting and dreaming about for the past sixty years or so. {  “Eeep!”  }

— Um, I gotta go, but I’ll come back and finish this a.s.a.p. —

~~~~~ Jim

Very Cold – But Very Pretty Out There –

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, February 3rd, 2018 —> -15˚C / +5˚F & very “brrrrr” outside @ 5:11 pm in Atlantic Canada —> On Melanie Savka’s Birthday —

Nice Sunlight on snow covered Birch Trees.

– Very Pretty Light Effects with bright sunlight on snow covered birch trees up the hill and across the field beyond our property here –

— it was -21˚C / -6˚F with an evil wind { Wind chill down around -28˚C / -20˚F } around 8 am this morning.

Screen Shot

– Screen shot of Link to Kindle Scout Campaign for my NaNoWriMo -2017 project “Llyn Ellyn ( Healing Waters Run Deep )” —

 

<— { Don’t click on what looks like a link over there }

— Link = —> https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/2QR82SBDNQMRN <—

— & I’ll probably need all the help I can get Because the way Kindle Scout Campaigns work is —> It looks like a popularity contest where the manuscripts that get the most votes have the best chance for being published at Kindle / Amazon & the author actually getting paid for his or her work.

Jim With Boston Hat -

– This is the photo of me that I gave them at Kindle Scout –

— I think you should be able to read the blurb above the link over there on the left – & remember that link is only a screenshot – it won’t work as a link. { he said, repeating himself – }

— Catherine M. Harris did the cover art 🙂 I’m impressed.

— This campaign began this morning, and I have no idea how to find out if anybody likes the manuscript enough to ‘nominate’ it –

— So, I’ll probably not be getting much sleep in the next thirty days …

— But, like I said above – The world is bitterly cold out there, but it is beautiful – & If my allergies don’t kill me, or the stress doesn’t kill me, I just might make it to the end of this month long ‘Campaign’ and find out if anybody believes I have enough ‘talent’ to say so –

— sigh —,

~~~~~ Jim

Monday, January 15th, 2018 – Brrrrr –

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, January 15th, 2018 —> -20˚C / -4˚F {{ -27˚C / -21˚F Windchill }} & Dark and Very Cold @ 7:00 am in Atlantic Canada —> On Jenny Leigh’s Birthday 🙂 —

Snow Squall last Tuesday.

– This was last Tuesday – Most of our snow melted over the weekend – then the hard freeze came in and Brrrrrrr! –

—  Eeep! It just took me four tries to get the above photo in here –

— It’s +4˚C /+40˚F in Whitehorse NWT right now. Only New Orleans is warmer than that in the continental US, according to the weather network.

— Schnarr —

— But, today is a cutey named Jenny Leigh’s birfday. She can’t be 21 years old, can she? nah – impossible.

— I dreamed I was trying to explain parallel worlds to somebody in French. – after walking around a section of a building that in one parallel dream world was a restaurant, but in the world I was in during that dream, was surrounded by solid wood paneling, and somebody told me that inside that place, in that dimension – it was a place to go and get stuff you need, and not any kind of store. Um, sounds like a free store in the ‘here-after’ ?

~~~~~  Jim

Blah Tuesday, November 7th, 2017

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, November 7th, 2017 — +2˚C / +35˚F —> cloudy & grey in Atlantic Canada —

retweet

– Wisdom from @noveliscious – Yes, in life and in writing, most people sound like somebody else, repeating ( or ‘Parroting’ if you find them annoying ) words, ideas and tone of voice / style of narrative they’ve either admired or feared. Bullies act like the bullies who bullied them. Writers write like the writers who impressed them. Maybe when you get a glimpse at someone who is truly original, you’ve found a treasure. And maybe the truly original found that treasure first? –

— sigh, Yesterday I felt like I was either coming down with something, or somehow felt a sense of impending doom, waiting for another shoe to drop, half expecting the phone to ring with news that somebody I love and care about is about ready to foresake this mortal coil in favour of that brave jump into the ‘unknown’. But even prophets and saints grieve, no matter how much proof they’ve discovered that life does not end when the spirit leaves the body.

— And, this morning I have a scratchy throat that might be ‘other than allergies’ —> Schnarr –

— Shrug –

— Also yesterday – I did manage to scan one of the photos my sister sent me. A family photo taken in a cemetery. I could probable easily crop the grave stones out of the picture and nobody’d know we were posing in what my father called a ‘marble orchard’.

Family photo

– I noticed after I found this photo and scanned it that I’m the only actual surviving one out of 4 of my parents’ children in this photo – Yesterday I wondered if that was a pure accident or had been designed that way. – hmmm —

— Yeah, in the past this was a rough time of year. My father ‘passed over’ on October 26th, 1995, my last surviving grandmother ‘passed’ almost exactly a year later, and the kicker was my five year old niece who left us due to smoke inhalation in a fire a week after my grandmother left us. My sister, Diane, mother of the 5 year old fire victim, had her birthday on November 10th, and never felt like celebrating anything around this time of year after 1996 – she developed Cancer and left us in March of 2007, ten years and 4 months after her daughter died.

— so maybe my sense of impending doom was just something to do with the time of year and its not so pleasant memories?

— or maybe I really was coming down with something? { — plop (?) }

— [ insert stupid silly grinning smiley here ]

~~~~~ Jim

Saturday, November 4th, 2017 —> A #ClimateKnucklehead Calls Someone a #ClimateBarbie ?

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, November 4th, 2017 — 3˚C / 36˚F with over-bright sunshine and blue skies in Atlantic Canada @ 9:16 am ?

Solar panels for tiny house warriors.

#ClimateWarriors? While conservative politicians act like junior high school bullies, women and free-thinkers ignore them and build a better future without their #bullchips.

— Gag – The cat woke me up, complaining that nobody’s given him any cat treats in several hours? My neck hurt and my head ached, so I tried to fix that with coffee. While I drank the coffee I made the mistake of switching on the network news. They are making a big deal out of a woman politician calling out someone who called her a ‘#ClimateBarbie’.

— I don’t know. If we ignore these idiots, do you think they’ll just pack up and walk away? Should we respond to their ‘bull-chips’? If we sink to their level – would that just encourage them?

— ‘High Authoritarians’ are the only group of morons who believe that everybody with half a brain on this planet agrees 100% with their values. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Too many high authoritarians are functioning on half a brain? And high authoritarians are the fools who tow the conservative line and try to get themselves elected into ‘powerful’ positions by bragging about their brainless ability to parrot any mean-spirited ‘bull chips’ their brain-dead ‘leaders’ use to belittle their opposition in public.

— So —> Treat this as a poll?

— How should we deal with mean-spirited ice holes who call people and especially women names designed to belittle and provoke them?

  • A: Ignore them, maybe they’ll give up and go away?
  • B: Don’t ignore them, the idiots will believe they have a mandate to destroy the environment and enslave us all?
  • C: Call them #Climate-Jugheads ?
  • D: Call them #Climate-Knuckleheads ?
  • E: Explain to them that they are even more brainless than mindless Militants who believe they’ll get 72 adoring virgins after they blow themselves up in public?
  • F: Drop the ‘Big One’ & Let God sort us all out?
  • G: Give up, score some really good dope and go back to sleep?

— Sigh, “None of the Above”? / “Other” —

— Here’s an interesting photo from the #Tweet-us-sphere :

Hot air balloons over Turkey.

I think this is from a ‘Visit Turkey’ group. I don’t recommend that. Turkey’s politix are as insane as Donald J Trump’s. But I’ve always been intrigued by the area of Turkey where people have been digging their homes out of very soft stone that hardens when exposed to our atmosphere – been digging homes out of soft rock for millenniae. And this is an interesting photograph.

— I should quit while I just might be ‘still ahead’?

~~~~~ Jim

 

Monday, October 30, 2017 – The View From Beyond Frustation

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, October 30th, 2017 — 13˚C / 54˚F & Raining @ 6:12 pm in Atlantic Canada —

"Optical Delusion"

I took this photo with an Olympus ‘Trip 35’ in the middle 1970’s, Probably on a Saturday Morning, outside the building where I worked as I was on my way home. It became a “What do you think you see?” shot.

— Gaaaa! That is a Great Dane in the back seat of a 1970’s car that was not an antique back then.

— Um, I thought I might find a few things in the closet here in the office. Yeah, I did. I thought that and I did find some stuff that I was looking for. And I found a bunch of stuff I wasn’t looking for. But a ‘shipload’ of obstacles popped up every time I turned around. I found what might have been what I believed was one of my most important photo albums from ‘way back when’ With a couple photos I wanted to scan and share. But the printer/scanner that worked last week keeps telling me to check its connection. It doesn’t believe it is connected. { It has both a USB and a network connection. I’ve been using the network connection. Somebody else might be connecting it with the USB cable. I think that maybe after it’s been connected with the USB cable it doesn’t want to know anything about the cat5 network connection. I could be wrong. But I had to re-download the printer and scanner drivers, and the  [ expletive deleted ] ControlCenter vanished into the ozone when it was supposed to be installing itself. It keeps squawking that it isn’t connected and refuses to scan, unless I go back to the beginning with a system control panel, close the printer/scanner control panel, reopen it  – and start over from scratch each time I want to scan anything. Then again, of course, I have to reset all the settings, change from all the stupid defaults and tell it where, how and in what format I want the scan to reach my desktop. And, if I give it a name – other that ‘Scan +#’ it short circuits and its stupid little – definitely nothing like ‘AI’ – brain explodes and we have to start all over again. It took me three hours to scan two photos.

— Here’s the second one :

Nuke in 1969.

This is my father, or was, in 1969, sitting in a motel room in Illinois. – One of the first photos I took with my Olympus Trip 35 camera (which I bought at a ridiculous discount at the Naval Training Center in Waukegan Illinois). An artist in Italy – who did a really nice job of creating an oil portrait from this photo jokingly asked if he was loading his gun. Nope, he was counting the money he had left in his wallet.

— Yes, so the price of having cleaned away a little bit of dust and digging through a closet to find a couple photos and then scanning two of those photos — well, it only cost me  a whole lot of peace of mind and nearly had me snapping with the kind of deep down ugly schnarr tone of voice that could have sent the person I love most on this planet, and maybe not just this time around — into a stunned state somewhere between ‘anxiety attack’ and ‘deeper depression than any human deserves to experience’ — or, she may have rallied her way out of being screamed at by ripping my head off.  { Shrug – none of those alternatives would have made me feel any better, and a couple of them would have totally destroyed me. }

— One ‘document’ I found when I was looking for stuff began with “Microsoft Executives should probably be offered a choice between public evisceration and castration.” – Yeah, I think I know how that guy felt when he wrote that.

— Uhm, let me try to find something positive to leave you with here:

Cathi Smiling

This is the love of my life when we discovered that her favorite place to get “Pho” noodle soup was indeed open again. If you look closely at the image on the wall behind her, you might notice an odd reflection to the right that has placed a kind of ‘ghost’ of the black and white woman’s smile and facial outline near a nearly subliminal image of an eye – That’s a trick of very clean glass at just the right angle to reflect something in a happily unexpected way.

— So yes, the world is still a decent place, and life is still very much worth living, even if Microsoft and a lot of other beedy grastards out there are doing everything in their power to create way too many frustration engines in the name of fleecing you and me for fun, power and all the money they can steal from us.

— I refuse to pay attention to any news stories tonight. If I lose control I just might snap at somebody who does not deserve to be snapped at and I learned at a very young age how to project deep down gut wrenching self-esteem bombs into the most vulnerable spots of any human being alive.

— Sigh, talent like that should definitely be wasted by counting at least to ten.

~~~~~ Jim

Sunday, July 23rd, 2017 – Notes on the ‘Human Condition’

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, July 23rd, 2017 —>  7˚C / 45˚F  —> Sunny & ‘Clear’ @ 7:18 am in Atlantic Canada  —> My good friend, Greg’s Birthday. —

Night Sky photographed at Mount Ranier.

– Doug Otterson re-tweeted this from a post by @StormHour – “A super bright fireball #Meteor racing down last night at Sunrise Point @MountRanierNPS” –

— Part of the problem with being human is:

— We’re something like 14 dimensional spirit beings { I did not pull that number out of a hat – it was explained by a ‘mystic’ who described one of the spiritual beings who watches over planet earth as being at least a 13th dimensional being — I know, it’s hard enough to grasp what a fifth or sixth dimensional being might be like — } —> We’re living in a three dimensional world, desperately trying to define ourselves in two dimensional terms.

— Our egos would love to be able to define us as bodies. But we know we’re more than that.

— Our egos would love to have a pretty painting of who we are that they could frame and hang on a wall somewhere so they could look at it and say, “That’s me, that’s who I am-”

— But even a photograph of what we looked like in any given moment is already obsolete one millisecond after the photo is taken.

— We are everything we see, everything we experience – have experienced – and will experience – on this billion year journey from creation back to report in with what we’ve found to the pure spirit we never were really separated from. It only feels that way down here in this dense part of the material universe.

— Go play early Fleetwood Mac’s “Hypnotized” —> “Feels like a dream, they’ve got me hypnotized-” And then find and play another early Fleetwood Mac song, “Future Games” —> “You’re not the only one, who’s ever { spent your life in ? } playing Future Games -”

~~~~ Jim