Black Friday Clouds

Yes, I braved Black Friday to get one or two things on sale, though most of the deals I found were online. I also remembered to bring my A470 even though it was drizzling when I went out. After one store I came out to a perfect blue sky, with unbelievable clouds. I was even in some parking lots where the stores weren't in the way, and only a few light poles.

"Dogs and Cats Living Together!"

Since I got my first dog a number of years ago, the cat has been less than thrilled. She eventually stopped coming downstairs and I only saw her at night once the dog was asleep. It didn't get much better with the second dog. A few months ago I got tired of it. I started kicking the dogs out of the room for bugging the cat. (If I'm not in the room 99% of the time the dogs ignore the cat, so it is an attention seeking behavior.) I built cat shelves in the living room, figured out how to carry the cat downstairs without getting scratched ( the stairs are a closely guarded path), and moved on with the treats. It took 4 tries to find treats the cat would eat. She refuses anything without artificial colors and flavors, so I gave in and she gets Friskies (bleech!) cat treats. Just a few days ago I finally got my somewhat tubby cat to jump comfortably from shelf to shelf. (I only built two without a longing area, as I was unsure she would use them. I had been lifting her between the shelves, and encouraging her to jump down, since she wasn't quite ready for up.) I finagled the couch, and last night was her first time willingly jumping up all of them on her own, and she hung out there for a while. She's also been willingly coming all the way down the stairs, and hasn't been getting shanghied. (They jump her because her reaction is so spectacular, and for years she wouldn't scratch them.) I meandered out of the room, and when I came back I found this. (Mind you that dog is well aware I don't want her white hair and dirt on my dark colored, clean couch.)

Dogs and House Fires

So, one of my dogs is a dedicated counter surfer. There does not have to be food up there, just a previous presence of food, and she's up there looking. She also keeps licking the stove, and like most old stoves it has an irritating (to me) safety feature. You have to push in the knobs for it to turn on. You also have to twist them all the way around to light the gas. As one might expect a dog who counter surfs and a stove with this safety feature do not mix well. Once she turned on a burner when I was home, melted a milk jug. I was actually standing directly in front of the stove when she did it. A few weeks ago she did one better. I came home to a house reeking of that corpse smell (mercaptan) they add to natural gas so we'll notice it. My other dog threw up for three days after that. I locked them out of the kitchen, but pondered a solution. To turn on the gas you have to push in the knobs. I can't get the knobs off easily, so for convenience sake removing them wasn't an option. I came up with this. It's a piece of trim cut to a half inch longer then the width of the stove. The extra half inch means when you want to cook you can just slide it up. It sticks in there quite well, and the counter surfer has no interest in it, but can't turn on the stove, but can still lick the counters... grrr.... Also works against cats, and maybe small children.

I'll admit it...

I read Twilight. I managed to hold it off for so long though. I only read it a few weeks ago. And then I got sucked in. I bought New Moon, because I didn't want to wait the TWO MONTHS it took to get the first one out of the library. I didn't like Jake at all, so got Eclipse out of the library. That one only took a week. By that point I knew I'd have to finish it. Breaking Dawn also came from the library. Overall, I liked the series, or at least some of the ideas in it. That last book though... ouch. I'd say it was written either at a different time as the other three or even by a different person. It meandered a lot, maybe to use up all those pages? It just all got tied up a bit too neatly, and somehow none of the main characters suffer. I especially didn't like the middle of the book from Jake's view, but I disliked it before when that was done. Either a book is 1st person, or it isn't. The whole point is you only know as much as the person talking, so you don't switch around. Now I've got The Host: out of the library and am a little afraid to open lest I get sucked in like with Twilight.

Daylight Savings Time and the Night

I loathe Daylight Savings Time. Unlike, I guess a large majority, I don't have to get up early. I get up around 8, and get home from work around 5. I was perfectly happy with the sun coming up around 8, because it meant I didn't have to commute home in the dark every freaking day. I hate driving in the dark. Everyone drives slower, can't see as well, and the whole thing makes me nervous. So to compensate I go directly home from work leaving me with huge amounts of time to fill with something. Even if I go anywhere after work I still feel like I need to get home because it's dark... To make it more fun, neither of my dogs can read a clock, for about two weeks I get to wean their dinner time back to something normal. And they still want to go out an hour earlier now in the morning. This is the light levels if I'm lucky when I get out of work.

Freezing Cold Hiking

I like when it's cold enough for frost. We had a day of two like that in late October, and since then, nothing but warmish rain, and really weirdly warm days. I have lettuce in the ground with only a little cover that hasn't frozen yet. Fall Bulbs I planted months ago are trying to come up in the warm weather. I really can't wait for some snow, or at least an actual cold rain. My rosebushes, not only still have leaves, most of them still have buds. Weeks ago the blueberries considered opening their buds and starting Spring. A few days ago I saw an Autumn Meadowhawk (Sympetrum vicinum) in my back yard. It is way too warm out right now. Some pics from Moose Hill from October 30th, the last time it was really cold here.

Canon AE-1 Update

Well. It works, and I remember why I hate film cameras. 24 shots two nice ones. Anyone want a Canon AE-1 with some nice lenses?

Attic Cleaning and 80's Cartoons

So Sunday I got talked into cleaning out parts of my parent's attic. It is as you expect full of junk from my childhood, books and magazines that were not stored properly, and lots of shredded paper from mice. We hauled out about 15 milk crates full of books for donation, threw out some broken never used skis and poles, and I discovered Dad's been storing a 'Blue Bird' dummy terminal up there for more than 20 years... Some 15 year old sleeping bags went out, as did lots of assorted broken items. Only one thing looks resell able. A bike rack. Who's going to buy a bike rack in November? I found boxes and boxes of toys. My Little ponies have a very distinctive smell, though I don't remember any more which are mine and which are my sister's. It just sort of makes me want to find the original movies on DVD to see what I remember of them. I also found a little toy Pterodactyl with a button on it's back that moved the wings. Very low tech toy. I remembered it was from a TV show where the bad guys put mind control boxes on dinosaurs and attacked the good guys who had to get the dinosaurs to cooperate. Eventually I found the instructions to one of the toys, Dino Riders. A curious web search got me this: YouTube Dino Riders And then came the reasons I stay off You Tube My Little Pony: The Movie, Transformers. Someone, somewhere has saved just about everything. And yes we have entire collections of McDonalds and Burger King Toys, even though I never ate anything there but fries. I also saved a huge rubber maid container full of dinosaur and animal toys. And I actually packed it well enough it doesn't look like anything is living in it. At least I didn't find any enormous silverfish in it, like in some of the other containers. The entire attic cleaning is to convert the second bedroom of my parent's house into a movie room/ guest room. But we needed a place for all the stuff still in that room first.

Bird Feeders

I've been feeding birds for a very long time. But I've always been cheap about it. I hate how much nice bird feeders cost, and always tried to get by with the cheap ones. I've always wanted a platform feeder, mostly to keep the larger birds off my other feeders, where they just make a mess. I really love blue jays, but on smaller feeders they just terrorize the other birds. Last time I caught myself staring at that kind of feeder my brain pointed out it's 4 pieces of 1/2 with some screen tacked on the bottom, and some eye screws to hang it with. Hence this was made out of scraps in my house. I expect the squirrels to chew through the screen at any time. Until recently I couldn't figure out how to get good pictures of birds in the yard, but not obviously on the bird feeders. I picked up another Digital Wildlife Photography book at the library, and the author had put photogenic landing spots around his feeders, for the birds who were waiting for an open feeder to perch on. You just had to focus on the perch and wait. Now the only problem is finding some pretty "natural" perches, that the dog won't destroy.