life in the old lane

Lazy sort of a day today. It’s hot. But, it is summer. Thinking about a little train trip to somewhere cooler or beachy. Most likely will not do anything. But, I can think about it. 

Still have lots of photos from the trip to process. Thought I would show you how skillful a barge captain has to be.

Going through a lock.

If the lock had a tender the Captain always gave the tender a beverage and maybe a pastry after she got our barge safely nestled in the lock. One day we went through 16 locks but most days it was about 7 or 8. 

 

Actually, I took more than a few. I took over 200. And got a couple good enough to keep. I didn’t try very hard. Just braced the phone on the balcony ledge and tapped away on the “shutter”. While drinking and talking and watching. Lots of deleting.

Recorded a little anniversary greeting message for one of my neighbors this afternoon and I failed to get them to turn off the A/C. Really didn’t want to have to ask them to redo or. Or worse, have them send it to friends with the A/C in the background. 

Then I remembered. The newest feature in Final Cut Pro – one that I thought I would never use “Voice Isolation”. Well, it worked great. It would have been better to turn the A/C, but FCP cleaned up the audio track in a wink. 

 

I know, I know, you all have seen this picture before. But, to me it is special. And this is my blog. This is when Carlton issued his “after I am gone orders”:

1. 1. Take care of my sword, toy steam engine and chrome nut and bolt.  You can pitch everything else.
   2. When the lease is up move to Goodwin House.
   3. Don’t buy anything with wheels. Skateboard, bicycle, motorcycle, car, airplane, and if he had known about them he would have added electric scooter. 

And, except for breaking the lease to move into The Asylum early, I have followed his orders. The best one was giving me permission to without guilt get rid of all of his stuff.  

Going to a friend’s apartment to watch the fireworks tonight. Don’t need to take pictures. I have taken all the firework photos that I need to take.  Let’s look at the photos from 2014.

It’s hard to be a citizen of the USA at this point in time. Where did my generation go wrong?

Took a few flower and bug photos this afternoon. 

The only butterflies around were a couple of cabbage whites and this skipper. You photograph what shows up. 

Tried very hard to not obsess about my email issues today. Looking at things carefully, I think this problem started in mid-April if not sooner. And, I suspect it is as much caused by Gmail security as anything else. 

Warning: Old woman complaining. My legs have caused considerable  “trouble” since 2017 or so. They have been pretty good for the last couple of years but really started acting up on the trip. I have been taking the Carlton approach: It’s the legs problem and I just carried on. I don’t know.  Operating on the cheery assumption that the legs will get better. They actually seem to be worse if I let them rest. 

Observation: Trip to the grocery this morning resulted in serious sticker shock. Doing my quarterly financial review yesterday was a serious wake-up call as well. 

That was a great trip.

I had to put myself outside this afternoon in the heat and humidity. I was entirely too wrapped up in sorting out email addresses, logins, and passwords. Hence photos of bees and chipmunks. 

The good news. No great news. I downloaded my entire blog structure. The first ten years of “roll your own HTLM” and the last 11+ years of WordPress. So, I can bail out of A Small Orange hosting if I need to. And, I will download the entire site once a week. Right before I unleash my TimeMachine backup. 

That’s about it for now. The old eyes can only look at screens but so long. Fortunately, the Kindle seems to annoy other parts of my eyes. So, I can read some. And there are always audiobooks. Old age basically sucks. But, for now, it beats the alternative.

For the last few years, I didn’t obsess over Le Tour.  I think this year I may. Men in spandex with a death wish. What’s not to love? Years ago I went to Paris for the finish. Don’t think I could do it now, but that was 17 years ago. 24 July 2005 – Paris.

Had to look at the nice picture to eliminate the lingering unpleasantness of the day.

And what is unpleasant? Well, the food at the asylum. 

But what is really unpleasant is my email service. Crapped out again. I decided that twice in one week is too much. I have begun the task of moving maybe 100 email addresses to Gmail. 1Password is a help if an email address was the login. And my old emails also help. Any that I don’t find are most likely not that important. But, it is a huge pain in the tush. 

The same service that has messed up my emails hosts the blog and I can not get to the “Control Panel” to download a copy of the blog. I must say that I have been very remiss in downloading it and if it goes down all is lost. Needless to say, I am considering moving to a new hosting service. But, I have to have something to actually move. 

On this menu you will find barley, quinoa, bulgur, rice masquerading as dessert and buttery parsnips.  You will not find anything from the meat department. Surely they can do better than this.

Lazy day today. The Supreme Court continues to destroy the country. Today they made it impossible for the Feds to do much of anything about air quality and climate change. We are no longer the UNITED States. We are THE States. Now, let us see how well that works. As I recall we tried that in 1777. We are doomed. And let us eat buttery parsnips.

I could see the smoke around 5:30am from my bed. It was a house fire. Nobody was hurt. But, it didn’t help the house any.

This was last night’s beer. The beer was fine but the can was outstanding.  If you don’t live in the DC area you don’t know about the Surrender Dorothy CSX bridge graffiti. The Mormon Temple is visible as is the bridge from the Capital Beltway. (Which I drove around every day en route to work for decades.)

Just go read about Surrender Dorothy and also Surrender Donald in Wikipedia, they tell the story better than I will. 

(Not sure, but I suspect the blog has been moved to new servers.)

A neighbor came over for a little quick lesson in folding cranes. We had a good time and have agreed to meet every couple of weeks to fold. 

That was about the high light of the day. Well, the DC Gay Men’s Chorus will be performing here at The Asylum tonight. Not the entire group I am sure. And, I presume they will do a “tame” performance. Still, pretty cool alternative to bingo. 

The English bumble bees didn’t look like our Virginia bumble bees.

On the last day of the tour, we went to Upton Wold. We were shown around the estate by the owner Ian Bond. Sort of an eccentric wealthy old robber baron type. He was absolutely charming in an arrogant old-school manner.

I was pretty tired of English gardens by this time. But I rather enjoyed the 3 or 4 hours we spend wandering around his lands. Described as “as far as the eye can see”. 

A small herd of Scottish Hairy Cows AKA Coos live on the estate. For decoration.  It’s good to be rich.

Speaking of rich. Out on my fitness walk this morning. I realized that “exercise” is a luxury item. Most of the world’s population is too busy trying to just stay alive to have the luxury of going out for “exercise”. Just living is exercise enough.

I rather liked this sign. Thinking about having a tee-shirt made with that on it. 

Had a lovely restful day. I did my “fitness” walk before 7:00 am. That works a lot better than trying to do it after it gets hot.

So, what did I do? Had a nice al fresco breakfast with friends. Culled photos. Read. Folded some butterflies. Napped. And finally messed around post-processing a photo from my visit to Hidcote Manor. 

Trying hard not to complain about The Asylum’s food. It is simply dreadful. But, it’s nice to spend time with my friends. Don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have friends. Cook, I suppose.

 

After cleaning up the electronic mess, I put the macro lens on the camera and went on the little bee quest. This isn’t the “best” image – the bee should be in better focus – but – I like the little hoverfly.

And what was the electronic mess? Most of my emails vanished yesterday. I discovered it last night. I thought Google had changed some rules and it wasn’t accepting my forwarded traffic. Wrong, my email service wasn’t getting the messages. It was late and I was tired. I told myself I would get a good night’s sleep and attack the problem in the morning. Well, I did not get a “good night’s sleep”. 

Morning came. I messed around with the problem. Finally had to “chat” with someone in India. After much discussion, the chat person decided that Spam Assassin was incorrectly set up. And this was my fault? I don’t think so.  Anyhow, about 24 hours of traffic vanished. Spam Assassin assassinated all of my incoming emails. But, everything seems to be OK now. 

I am thinking that it might be time to simplify my email life. Just change everything to Gmail. It all ends up in Gmail anyhow. 

Simplification seems to be important as one ages. 

And, when I was chatting with someone in India, they told me that this very blog was going to be moved to a new server soon. So, I am expecting problems. 

Ain’t technology grand. To err is human, it takes a computer to really mess things up!