'Puter Problems

          Sometimes I want to lie in the grass, feel the sun on my skin, watch the clouds scuttle across the sky, listen to the wind soughing through the trees, and just be for a little while. Doesn't that sound like livin'? Then I remember all the things I need, have, and want to get done and I don't do it. In other words, I'm busy all the time but don't feel like I'm doing much living.

          This week especially. I spent a great amount of time in front of my 'puter. Last week's letter-blog ended up being 31 pages and I posted a part of it each day for three days. Although 31 pages sounds like a lot, considering it encompasses two weeks of my life it's really not so bad. You have to remember that on any given week I may fill 20 pages. I was mostly done with it by Sunday night. For the sake of time and space, I was going to leave out a couple of pictures and stories. But I was too tired to edit it and didn't want to post it without editing. I decided to give my brain a rest and watch some TV with Mike. As I sat there, it occurred to me that I'd been through the first part of my letter-blog at least once and I was fairly confident it would be okay to post. So I posted it Sunday night.

          Monday I went to work editing the center part, adding a few things I missed and then felt much better about it. I posted it Monday.

          And then I printed it. Sigh. And I suspect that's where things started to go bad for me. My printer prints a line or two correctly, then it'll print a line or two with double lines on the letters. I find it annoying even though it's still legible.

          And when it prints the pictures I get a line through the black parts and I don't like that at all. My pictures are pretty, most times, and I want them to be pretty when I print them.

          "Peg, maybe one of your print heads is clogged," you say.

          I know, right! I thought of that and did a nozzle check. They're not clogged. I sat there puzzling it over and I see my pigment black pattern has double lines in the middle of it.

          "Maybe the print heads are out of alignment," you say.

          That's what I was thinking! I did an automatic alignment and it didn't improve it all. I did a manual alignment with no better luck. After five or six goes at it, I decided to try something else.

          "Peg! Once would have been enough. Don't you think?"

          I don't give up that easy.

          "What did you decide to do?" you wonder.

          I decided to move my print heads way out of whack. If being aligned gives me bad print, maybe being out of whack would give me good print. Sigh. Don't laugh. I know I'm simple. But it didn't work and I wasn't completely surprised that it didn't. It only made the printing worse! I put the print heads back to the previous settings and turned to Google.

          The printer program may be corrupted. Try uninstalling and reinstalling it, one person suggested.

          Heck, sounds reasonable to me.

          So now it's past noon on Monday and I'm uninstalling anything on my computer that says Canon because I have a Canon printer. One of them seemed to be taking a long time and I was waiting when Mike yells from the other room, "Peg, when's my oil change appointment for the Jeep?"

          "I don't know," I yell back.

          "Will you look? I wrote it down on your notepad."

          I shuffled through papers on my desk trying to locate a notepad that was buried under a mountain of nozzle check and print head alignment papers. Then I flipped through the notebook looking for his note. "Monday the fifth at 1:30 pm," I called when I found it and said a silent Oh shit.

          "That's tomorrow?" Mike asked.

          "Nope! It's today!"

          Mike uttered a verbal, "Oh shit! If we leave now we'll just make it."

          I left the uninstall program to uninstall, jumped up, poured my freshly made coffee into a travel mug, grabbed my glasses and we were out the door. We were sitting in the car, putting the address in the GPS when my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. It was Kevin, our youngest and very handsome son. I knew it must be important or he wouldn't be calling in the middle of a workday.

          "I went into work this morning and they fired me," Kevin said.

          "Oh no!" I exclaimed. "What happened!"

          "They closed down the dock part of the business. We're all fired!"

          My heart broke for all the guys that worked with Kevin. They had families to support. "What are you going to do now?" I asked.

          "I called up my buddy from where I used to work. He said, 'What's up, Kevin?' and I said, 'I need a job.' He said, 'Come on in, you've got a job.'" Kevin laughed. "I wasn't even out of work for one day."

          I'm relieved and thankful that Kevin got his old job back. And I'm not surprised. Kevin is a hard worker, shows up for work on time and every day, and they never wanted to lose him in the first place. They just couldn't match the offer the other company had made.

          We went on into Scranton and got the oil changed. "Want to stop anyplace else while we're out?" Mike asked on the way home.

          "Nope. I wanna get home and finish working on my printer."

          I was hoping by the time we got home...

          "Waitwaitwait! Peg! Where's my road pictures?" you ask.

          Oh, sorry. I didn't see anything new or interesting to photograph.

          I was hoping by the time we got home the printer program would be finished uninstalling. It wasn't. In fact, it wasn't working at all. I had to reboot the computer then finish uninstalling the Canon programs. And I didn't have time to do anything else except get ready for exercise class.

          Tuesday morning I finished and posted the final part of my letter-blog. Then I went to work on my printer. I installed the printer driver from the Canon website, crossed my fingers, and printed a page. It was exactly the same as before. Double lines on some of the letters and lines through the dark parts of pictures. All that work for nothing. I guess I'll live with it until I get a new printer, I thought. And just so you know, the printer I had before this one was the same model Canon printer and it did the same thing. If history repeats, it's just going to get worse and worse and that's why I'd gotten a new printer.

          "Why did you get the same model?" you ask.

          I'd gotten the same model so I could continue to use my refillable ink cartridges. I didn't know I'd end up with the same problem.

          Tuesday night I closed the lid on my laptop before we went to bed, the same thing I've done every night for years. Wednesday morning, when I woke my computer up, it froze. Stalled. Was unresponsive. I fooled with it for a long time, being patient, trying to give the programs time to shut down on their own and eventually they did. Eventually I got my computer to shut down and restart and it seemed to be fine.

          Wednesday. Oh Wednesday! Why are you so mean to me! Wednesday when I woke my computer up it was again unresponsive. Remembering how long it took me to get the computer to shut down on its own the morning before, I decided to shortcut it and just pull the power.

          OY! What a mistake! Now my computer wouldn't start at all!

          Two thoughts came to me that morning as Mike and I both worked on my computer. First, I must have inadvertently uninstalled something I shouldn't have. And second, I'm going to lose all my pictures and letters and sermons since the last time I backed up those files. Luckily, that only amounts to a few days worth as I'd just backed up my files at the end of the week before.

          After shutting down and restarting my computer a few hundred times (a slight exaggeration I'm sure) I thought my computer might be toast. But I don't give up easily. I dug around in the closet and got my old computer out of storage and dusted it off. Now I had two computers I could work on. I could update the old one while I kept rebooting the new one. It's not new. It's a couple of three years old. Current one then. Every time I got it to reboot it would get a little further and a little further until eventually it would load as far as the home screen before it froze again. And that's why I keep trying the same thing over and over. Sometimes it works! I cheered when I was able to get to my pictures and back them up, it was those I was most sorry to lose. Then I did a defragmentation of my hard drive and today everything seems to be working okay.

          Whew!

          I never did get the old computer updated. I could get online with Internet Explorer then I'd get a message saying it stopped working and my only choice was to close the program. All on its own it would try to re-launch the webpage with the same result. It just kept doing that over and over again. I installed Google Chrome and when I got on the internet with that, I'd get a message saying Security Alert. Page Not Secure and it wouldn't do anything else. 

          I have other means to access the internet. I have an iPad but that won't work for downloading my camera or for writing my letter-blogs. I can't type on the iPad, I have to hunt and peck. I also have my smartphone but again, it won't work for pictures or letter-blogs. I'm one of the few remaining people who depend on a laptop to do what I do, which is send you my love every week. My love in the form of my pictures and stories.

          Mike and I went to Wysox to pay our taxes. Boy! If you ever want to get Mike going, just ask him about Pennsylvania taxes! We could have mailed them but Mike wanted to have a stamped PAID receipt in his hands.

          "Let's get some batten strips and finish the batten on the kitchen wall before I put in the electric," Mike said.

          I'd asked him to put an outside receptacle in the kitchen alcove so I didn't have to run an extension cord through the window when I clipper our little girls. "Okay by me."

          From Wysox there's a back way to C.C. Allis, the lumber company where Mike wanted to buy the batten strips. How about some fresh road pictures? I haven't been on this road in years!

          PENNDOT has erected a visual to show us how many highway workers have lost their lives while on the job. A reminder to slow down and move over when we see them working on the roads.

           I found two barn quilts I hadn't seen before. The first one we were almost past before I saw, hence it's blurry, but you get the idea.

          This one I have seen before, may even have a picture of it somewhere. His colors aren't as bright as they once were — just like me!

          Unless you're vigilant about it, you can certainly acquire a lot of stuff! It's not hard to do when you bring in a piece at a time and you don't know how much you truly have until you have to move it. I've acquired a lot of glass to make garden totems and I had to move it all in order for Mike to be able to put the batten strips on the kitchen wall.

          As we worked I noticed the bees going in and out of a crack between two boards under my kitchen window. The thought of entombing them bothered me.

          "Mike, can we leave a hole for the bees?" I asked.

          "What bees?" He hadn't seen them and I pointed them out. "I don't care about the bees."

          "I do!" I cried. "They're honey bees and honey bees are endangered." Okay, okay! That may not be true but I don't like to kill things if I don't have to.

          Mike saved the window for last. "You better put that one on last or you're going to have a bunch of mad bees," I advised. Did he listen to me! NO! Did he get stung? Yes.

          As I watched the bees coming back and trying to get into their home, my heart was sad. "Mike, can't we leave a hole for the bees?" I cried.

          Mike surprised me when he said, "I meant to leave that board off, but I forgot." He got a hammer and loosened the batten enough for the bees to have access to the hive.

          "Is there a queen in there?" he asked.

          "I'm sure there is."

          "When will the bees be gone?"

          "I don't know."

          "What if a bear comes along and tears off the siding to get the honey?" he worried.

          "I guess we'll fix it." I can't help the way I am. If anyone has any ideas on moving the hive, let me know. I'm open to all suggestions except killing them.

          Three Cedar Waxwings! Aren't they a pretty bird.

          "Peg, why are there no leaves on that tree?" you wonder.

          I know, right! I wondered the same thing too, once I got done admiring the birds. I guess it's dead.

          Last time I showed you a picture of a ladybug.

           This week I found a nymph of that kind of ladybug — and it's eating aphids!

          A golf cart ride on our back dirt road netted two pictures for you.

          For us, we found a bunch of tools in the ditch. It was the red toolbox that got my attention. From there we found Thor's hammer, a socket, and a screw gun — do you think he could have lost the battery that goes with it! No!

  

     

          "It was probably the same guy that lost all those nails the Kipps have been finding," I told Mike.

          Rosie and Lamar told us that in the span of just a few days they found like a dozen nails and a bolt on the road while on their morning walk.

          To me, it looked like the guy drove down in the ditch and I think that shook the tools from the back of his truck. Mike thinks he came off the bridge too fast and the tools slid off as he made the curve. Unless one of my local readers knows who lost these tools, we'll probably never know the answer.

          Something else we found was this guy, hanging on the windshield of the golf cart. This is a Tan Jumping Spider and he's not about to let go of his lunch, which is a Crane Fly.

          And a spider web.

          I saw it as we went down the road but couldn't see it on the way back. Mike is a good husband though, turned the cart around and had another go of it. This time he spotted it before me.

          Our burn pile. When Mike dumps the stumps and brush on top, it's got enough soil attached that the burn pile now has its own ecosystem. I see the Teasel in the front is blooming. Behind it is the orange of the Touch-me-nots or some call it Jewelweed. On the left of the Teasel is Boneset blooming.

          Two pictures of the Burr Cucumber. It's blooming.

          What the heck is that? I wondered and snapped a couple of pictures. It looks like the pale body of something hanging from the Bergamot but I suspect it's just a spent bloom. Still, it freaked me out for a second.

          The Goldenrod is blooming. There are two kinds in this picture. See them?

          The Lance-leaf is just starting to bloom.

          But the Rough-stemmed has been blooming for a while now. 

          I had this wildflower growing here, on Michael's dirt piles, but he's cleaned the piles up and I don't have it anymore. But it is growing beside the road. This is Purple Loosestrife. It can be invasive, crowding out the native plants. It's been used in folk medicine to treat diarrhea and dysentery.  

          I was up to the church the other day and while waiting I decided to explore the Milkweed growing at the edge of the playground. Jackpot! I found a Monarch caterpillar! A nice big one. I took his picture then went back inside.

          "Pastor Rick! Look what I found!" and I showed him the picture.

          "Oh my! What is it?" he asked.

          "It's a Monarch caterpillar and the only food they eat is the Milkweed — so don't mow it down!" I ended in a mock stern, no-nonsense voice — and a smile on my face.

          He pretended to be afraid. "Okay!" Then, "Why don't you take it home?"

          What a great idea and why hadn't I thought of that, I wondered. "Can I?"

          "Yes. Take it home."

          So all the way home I wondered what I was going to keep him in. I Googled it and one web site talked about how they had special mesh-covered houses to keep them in. How they kept them outside so they were acclimated to temperature and humidly levels. How it's important to give them fresh food every day.

          I stood on my back patio and spied a little 'house' I'd picked up at a yard sale. It was missing a few panes of glass and the lady practically begged me to take it. I had no idea that one day I'd need it for a butterfly house. I went to work and using a little screwdriver, I removed the glass from two sides and the top. In one of my kitchen drawers, I had fine mesh bags that were given to me and I think they were meant to keep veggies in but I never used them. I cut them open and used them to screen in the little house.

           Then I went looking for some young, dust-free, Milkweed. I start up the hill toward the upper barn, where I knew there was some Milkweed growing, and a moth glides past me and lands right in front of me. Did I have my camera? No! "You stay right there!" I told him and hightailed it back to the house. I really was surprised when he was still in the same spot when I got back. This is a Crocus Geometer.

          And this guy...

          "I know what he is," you say. "A grasshopper!"

          I know, right! That's what I thought too! But he's not. He's a Katydid and more specifically, with his brown back, he's a Gladiator Meadow Katydid.

          I came back to the patio with my fresh-picked Milkweed and moved my Monarch caterpillar into his new home. I was so excited that I'd get to watch him transform into a beautiful butterfly.

          "How long do they stay a caterpillar?" you ask.

          He stays a caterpillar for ten to fourteen days.

          The next day when I went to give my caterpillar fresh food, I found him hanging from the rafters of the house. He'd attached himself.

          "I'm going to have a chrysalis!" I excitedly told Mike. But he hung there and he hung there and he hung there all day and I didn't see anything happening. Besides attaching himself, I saw no more effort in spinning his cocoon or chrysalis. The next day he looked the same as the day before. Uh-oh, I thought. He died. And I was sad. And I kicked my own butt. I would rather have left him in the wild and alive then captured for my own pleasure and dead.

          I don't actually know what prevented me from throwing the whole thing out but I didn't. The next day I peeked in and found this! I do have a chrysalis! He wasn't dead!

          I Googled it and found a video on the transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis and it isn't what I thought at all. There's no cocoon spinning. Instead, he splits his back and out comes the fully-formed chrysalis. I can't believe I've lived all these years, been a country girl most of my life, and never once raised a Monarch butterfly for myself. But I guess it's never too late.

          I didn't have much to post on my board for August so I decided to post some of my critter and flower pictures along with descriptors.

          "Who's brave enough to hold that spider like that?" I was asked at church a couple of times this morning as the person shivered with revulsion.

          "Me!" I'd say with a certain amount of pride. "They're not aggressive. They won't bite unless you pinch them."

          Getting my printed pictures to church can be a challenge for me. I tend to wrinkle stuff I throw in my bag.

          Under my butcher block are a couple of tins that just live there. Unpacking a box one time, that's where I threw them and they've been there ever since. I picked up a cute teddy bear tin and put my pictures in that. I was satisfied I'd get them to the church un-wrinkled.

          At church, Miss Rosie helped me arrange my board. I put the lid on the now empty tin and took it back out to the Jeep. Just as I was getting ready to toss it in, I felt a paper on the bottom of it. I flipped it over and there was a Christmas card.

          Oh no! I thought to myself. If Miss Rosie gave me this she'll be disappointed that I never even opened the card.

          I opened the card where she couldn't see and was relieved it wasn't from her.

          "Who was it from?" you wonder.

          "It was from my old boss at Curves." I have no idea how I missed opening the card but had a good laugh out of it just the same.

          My friend Jody came over and we made — she made a butterfly. 

          We were attaching the antenna when we realized we had a glass gob on the wrong side. "We have to put it together like this or take it apart and do it the other way," I told Jody. As we looked at it, we both decided we rather liked it that way. "And to think all the times I took mine apart because I had it on backwards!" I told Jody. "If I'd known how pretty it was, I wouldn't have bothered."

          I think her butterfly is beautiful.

         

          And with that, let's call this one done!