Sidetracked Charley

Facebook Report Card I don't do apps on Facebook so why I got sucked in with this one when I was tagged by a friend I haven't a clue. But once I had it posted on my page it immediately sucked me in. And it has not been a happy experience. Report cards were a major thing when I was a kid. We had to excel. And let me say for the record that this card would have been a major event at our house. C's and D's were never tolerated. Regardless of the fact that in the end I have a B average. Let me explain they have the friend number wrong. I have more friends (well, a few more) than that. But my grade school report cards often had a special note from the teacher that I did not play well with others. Not that I was mean or anything. I just found my classmates on the whole boring. I would rather sit in a corner of the playground and draw or write. Doing that in class because I found the teacher boring often also earned me the classic line, "Does not use time wisely...

Aspens turning First my sister found out she had won first place for one of her photographs in the 35th International show in Raton. So she made plans to drive up Friday morning after she got off work. Then the repaired computer at last arrived on Thursday. Its hard drive had been replaced so what was once suppose to be Charley VI and became Charley VII because Charley VI would not boot up should probably have been renamed Charley VIII because it has a totally new mind that I have been trying to set up. But I digress again. Friday came too fast and we drove out to Raton to pick up my sister's award. Her first big award for her photography so she was soaring for sure. Then Saturday we once again went four wheeling with her Jeep Rubicon. The Aspens were turning. Where oh where did the year go? And my weekend with my sister was all too fleeting. But she taught me to use the cloning tool on my photo editing program. How to successfully shoot macro pictures. And to microwave scr...

  Moving does not mean packing up the household belongings and hitting the road. As a child with a father in the military, and then later in my youth working for a major construction management company I got to redo my life on a regular basis via United Van Lines. Home was just where my parents lived. And given their lives not anywhere I had lived often. Now I have lived in the same house for almost 15 years and in the same geographic area for almost 23. I until recently would image moving house just to not have to be trapped. But I have at last discovered that movement can be a rather static thing. It can be just a shift in attitude. Or turning just a bit to be aware there is another path to follow. It can be not calling the same friends for lunch or belonging to the same board of directors. It can be like the newly emerged butterfly just quietly pumping its wings full so it can fly - a movement so still as to be almost no movement at all at first...

After having put Fedex and HP down in a couple blogs I thought I ought to say something good about a company. After the external hard drive crashed last October and then the computer service tech I took it to erased the hard drive on my desktop I signed up for the Carbonite Cloud . It is an ethernet back up service that takes the worry out of backup. I am an artist and I admit for losing complete track of time about backing up my computers. Or loading photos into my FlickR account. With the cloud I just have to be on line and anything new I post is backed up. And I can be on any device to access the cloud and pluck down information. I first used it when I had forgotten to download a file from my desktop to my laptop before taking off to a fair. Then again when the desktop failed yet again. I bought a new computer and upon receipt of it could immediately get the backupped data from the cloud and put it on the new one. Now my desktop (still under warranty with HP) has failed and jus...

My HP computer broke again. Mother board this time. And of course it crashed on the first day of Labor Day weekend. It was under warranty and I have a laptop, but my desktop is where I do all my company business and all my photo editing. And, of course, I had a deadline on getting some photos printed for a show I was accepted in. HP agreed that only 8 months old the computer was under warranty. They would send me a shipping box. It left their center on Tuesday with second day express shipping. It was schedule to be delivered by Fedex on Thursday. That delivery date was critical because I could then box the offending computer and call for pickup on Friday. With any luck it would be in the repair center on the following Tuesday at the latest. I cancelled all appointments to not miss the Fedex delivery van. I rushed downstairs after making the bed just in time to see it pull out of my driveway. No box on porch where most drivers leave packages, no box at my renter's...

Ernestine In the old days before technology ran wild you had a chance of talking to a real receptionist or a real operator. Note I did not say human. Ma Bell, the mega telephone company we insisted on breaking up, gave all their operators and service personnel a list of questions and responses from which they could not vary. One of Ernestine's lines on the old Laugh In comedy show was, "Is this the person to whom I am speaking?" I was reminded of Lily Tomlin that made Ernestine famous yesterday in a series of telephone calls to HP and Fedex concerning the undelivered package to ship my broken computer back in. Both have a set list of questions and responses from which they are not allowed to vary regardless of how inappropriate the are.  "Your driver failed to deliver the chemo drug package this week and my husband has died." " We are sorry for your inconvenience." "The funeral is Wednesday." " We apologize for any inconveni...

It has been raining this week. The grass as greened up and every wild flower that didn't bloom this spring because of lack of rain has burst into bloom. My neighbor has put his horses back in the field behind me. I throw on a hoodie and sit on my studio stoop with my camera and coffee. Life is good. And so is the light if you like taking pictures. What a rotten time to have my desktop computer with the Corel Paint Shop program down. So I have contented myself with cropping on my laptop. Meanwhile the list of things to do before winter settles in grows. But I just cannot pull myself away from the photographic opportunities visible from my stoop. Oh, well, maybe next week the weather and view will not be so nice.

If this is September can scenes like the one be far behind? Typing this from my laptop, Traveler. No, I am not traveling except in my mind. And once again my desktop is awaiting shipment back to the mothership of HP. I had cleaned my laptop of excess photos when Charley V failed and Charley VII was on order. That was end of November 2010. One thing would lead to another and I would not have my new desktop until almost the last day of that year. So when it failed yesterday I was well within my warranty time. Tech support always creates chaos in my not that orderly desk area. Which led last night to found things and lost things - including my temper. But in the cool light f predawn I find myself wondering where the last year has gone, how many photos it is possible to put on a hard drive in less than nine months, and maybe it is time while the desktop is gone to rearrange the office area like I thought last December. And is there a way to organize my  computer desk so when the ...