Amusives – New Computer, Same Old Sense of Humour

Things I Overlooked.

Something else I did not realize.

At 12:43 UTC on September 22, 2024 the Sun was directly above the equator. That meant that every place in the world had roughly equal hours of day and night. World wide we were ‘all on the same page’ sort of, for a brief period of time. For some reason I have been overlooking the significance of the September Equinox from a world wide perspective. I usually just think about it in terms of how much I dislike getting up before the sun does.

About the Computers

My new MacBook Air automatically downloaded and installed the new OS, Sequoia. The new bits in this OS have not really registered with me – because I did not know much about what was old. I did learn one of the new features though, and it is truly cool. The web browser, Safari, lets you make an element on a webpage disappear. The feature is called Distraction Control and when you activate ‘Hide Distracting Items’ and then click on the item, the item dissolves into little tiny bits of this and that – then disappears. Very satisfying. Very colourful too, if the item is in color.

Speaking of Control – or Lack Thereof

How Hard Would This be to Make!?!?

From the strange World of Fashion: Balenciaga introduced this as part of their spring 2024 collection: a gray terry cloth towel worn as a unisex, mid-rise, knee-length skirt. One enterprising soul presented his/her version from the IKEA collection.

With Canadian Thanksgiving Only a Few Weeks Away – I think About Being Thankful

After 50 some years of exposure to the Metric system in Canada, I still think of my weight in pounds and my height in feet and inches… there are other ways to measure things, of course…

My recent annual physical check up was a good news/bad news story of decline. My weight continues to decline, but my height does too. It seems to me that being within 1/2 inch of 5 feet tall allows me to say I am 5 feet tall, right!?

If I had Known I did Not Have to Eat Less and Exercise More!

A PC User Moves to an Apple MacBook

The Coffee Maker in the non dream world

Imagine If You Will you are in your own home, but the dials for your coffee maker and toaster oven  are on the wall, up by the ceiling. Your clock is up there too. Your windows look different and you have to close them with a button on the top left of the wall, up by the ceiling too. Your Recycle Bins have all become Trash Cans and you have a Launchpad on the side of a pleasant piece of art. You have a Time Machine and a Mission Control there too! There appears to be a Band in your Garage.

No, you are not in the Twilight Zone. It is just the kind of ‘things have changed’ dream you might have after a few days of being a  ‘Windows 10 PC user’ who has moved to an Apple ‘MacBook Air’.

All things considered, the switch to a MacBook has been relatively easy. Certainly no more difficult than adjusting to some of the changes Microsoft has thrown at PC owners over the years. Here are a few of the more obvious differences between the two operating systems:

– Program menus are stuck to the top of the screen, not to the program window.
– Program windows are closed with the icons on the left side of the window, not the right.
– The Start Menu is an icon called Launchpad.
– The backspace key is called delete. To delete forward, press Fn + delete.
– The iCloud is a tricky, potentially dangerous place if you do not understand the options for syncing. Make sure you have a complete back up of your files on an external drive for when you screw this up.
– Files are viewed in a program called Finder. I do not think it is not as good as Windows File Explorer.
– Program installation has been easier than doing the same task on a PC and all my peripherals were plug and play.
– The Time Machine (auto back up to an external drive) was easy to set up.
– My iPad, iPhone and MacBook all talk to each other which makes it easy to look at and move iCloud photos and read emails and messages.
– I love the finger print scanner.

I do not see myself going back to buying a computer that uses Microsoft Windows though I will continue to occasionally use the PC that I own. It quit working (which is why I bought a new computer) and has now started working again after somehow recovering from the August Windows update. I believe Microsoft installed a fix. The machine had been spinning its wheels and going nowhere for several weeks (and was hooked up to the internet), then suddenly it was working like normal. Correlation or causation?

A note of thanks to all of you who commented on my last post, A Forced Sabbatical – some good observations and suggestions!

A Forced Sabbatical

My Windows 10 Computer objected strenuously to the  August 2024 Operating System update. Apparently it didn’t like some of the new features Microsoft was forcing down its throat. I took it (the computer) to a repair shop where they discovered an OS now so corrupted that the only way to hopefully revive it was to wipe it clean, then reinstall everything. There was an outside chance my computer would work for a short while after that, but its digestive system would never be comfortable again with the  crap Microsoft would continue to feed it.

After a long talk with the tech guy, I decided to bring the patient home without the drastic surgery. I will use it in ‘limp mode’ long enough to make sure I have a complete back-up of all my files. Then I will begin the arduous migration to not only a new machine but a switch from a PC to a Mac. Yes, I am going over to the other side.

It will take some time to learn the Apple way of doing things… but I can’t imagine that will be any worse than new and annoying Windows things like  ‘Copilot’. It is an AI ‘companion’ that keeps popping up as I write this in the MS Edge Browser. (I would be using my normal web browser, Firefox, but it has been rendered inoperable for some reason…)

And so it is that my long relationship with Windows based computers comes to an end. There will be a brief but heart felt service for my trusty old laptop before I send it off to the recycle company. I hope to be up and running with a new computer in days… or weeks… or months…

Do tell – are you a Mac or a PC person?

 

 

Common Yet Rare

Deer and Clouds and Butterflies and Hawks are not exactly rare, unless…

… the deer are two Mule Deer Fawns in my yard, early one morning. They were as interested in me as I was in them! I slowly walked towards them, snapping photos. They slowly walked towards me. Then, I suppose, they remembered they were not supposed to be doing what they were doing, where they were doing it… and they bounced off into the forest.

What do you call a cheesy baby deer on your lawn in the morning?
Fawn dew.

…the clouds are Mammatus Clouds. They look like Cotton Balls or Bubbles. They develop on the undersides of other normal looking clouds during unstable air conditions. Not much is known about them because they are quite rare. When they do form, they often don’t last very long. I saw these ones as a storm approached near sunset.

Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning –

… the butterflies are  Long Dash Butterflies and they are mating.  They remained in this position for many, many, many minutes. So many minutes that I went into the house and got another camera – the one with the macro lens. I’ve read that some butterflies will stay in the mating position for up to 8 hours. Given how vulnerable they are to predators during mating… I’m not sure why they do what they do.

… the hawks are not just any old hawk – they are juvenile Cooper’s Hawks.  Cooper’s often nest and raise their young in our woods, but we rarely see three juveniles, let alone three of them lined up on our fence. I would have loved to see them land on this perch, because they are still too young to be good at landing!

Last – this is a very rare sighting – a Dodge Ram pick-up taking shelter under the branches of our spruce trees. A hail storm was tracking our way and this was the option The Car Guy came up with to protect his truck on very short notice.

Hailstones in our yard in 2014. The size is moth balls on steroids.

Fortunately this storm missed us. (Other years it didn’t miss us.)  But it did extensive damage a few miles south of us. Hail stones the size of golf balls pelted some parts of north Calgary, including the Calgary International Airport. Parts of the Terminal had to be closed when some of the roof was damaged. Sixteen planes were damaged too.

Hailstones can range in size from small peas to grapefruits and can fall at speeds of up to 100 km/h or more. Someone found this ‘almost a grapefruit size’ Hailstone in Edmonton, Alberta in 2019

Alberta has the greatest frequency of hailstorms in Canada. The province sees an average of 50 hailstorms a year, (based on data collected between 1986 and 2015).

Hailstorms occur because Alberta’s croplands provide moist air which is forced upwards as it heads west toward the Rocky Mountains. When this air enters the higher foothills elevations just east of the mountains, the freezing air close to the earths surface allows the hail to reach the ground.

Watch this video to see some historical really big hailstones !

The T-Shirt – A Blank Canvas #4

Doctor: You have a severe iron deficiency.
Me: How did you know? I just walked in!
Doctor: Your t-shirt is all wrinkled.

Dear Alcohol, we had a deal, you were going to make me funnier, sexier, more intelligent and a better dancer. I saw the video, we need to talk.

A nurse walked into a bank, totally exhausted after a long shift. She grabbed a deposit slip, pulled a rectal thermometer out of her purse, and tried to write with it. When she realized her mistake, she looked at the flabbergasted teller and, without missing a beat, said, “Well, that’s great…some asshole’s got my pen!”

Why does the military only allow dress shirts at its ceremonies?
Because civilian casual tees are unacceptable.

Farmer Joe decided his injuries from the accident were serious enough to take the trucking company (responsible for the accident) to court. In court, the trucking company’s  lawyer asked Joe, “Didn’t you say, at the scene of the accident,’ I’m fine’?”

Farmer Joe responded, “Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I had just loaded my favorite mule Bessie into the…….”
“I didn’t ask for any details,” the lawyer interrupted. “Judge, I am trying to establish the fact that, at the scene of the accident, this man told the Highway Patrolman on the scene that he was just fine. Now several weeks after the accident he is trying to sue my client. I believe he is a fraud.”

The Judge, however, wanted to hear Farmer Joe’s story and asked Joe to proceed.

“Well, as I was saying, I had just loaded Bessie, my favorite mule, into the trailer and was driving her down the highway when this huge semi-truck and trailer ran the stop sign and smacked my truck right in the side. I was thrown into one ditch and Bessie was thrown into the other. I was hurting real bad and didn’t want to move. But I could hear ole Bessie moaning and groaning and knew she was in terrible shape. Then a Highway Patrolman came on the scene. He could hear Bessie so he went over to her, took out his gun and shot her between the eyes. Then the Patrolman came across the road with his gun in his hand and looked at me. He said, “Your mule was in such bad shape I had to shoot her – how are you feeling?”

Sign of the Times and Things I Meant to Tell You

Two scientists, one from the Czech Republic and one from Austria, traveled to America to study the legendary grizzly bear.
When they failed to return from their trip into the woods, two park rangers went looking for them and found a male and a female bear at the scientists’ campsite.
They tranquilized the female grizzly and realized that the bear had eaten the Austrian.
The first park ranger said sadly, “You know what this means…”
The second ranger said, “Yeah, the Czech is in the male.”

How hard can it be to back up a boat trailer? (Let’s just say I would get a guy like this to do it for me, even if he had had a few brews…)

If my ducks really were in a row, I would have put this sign in my Donald, Duck! post: https://amusives.wordpress.com/2024/07/22/it-looks-like-a-duck-right/

… in 2007 in Washington State, there was an actual incident of a plummeting cow taking out a minivan. The van’s two human occupants escaped serious injury, but the cow had to be euthanized at the scene.
– Cowboy State Daily –

A map of the world according to fish.

I got my forklift license yesterday.
Eating salad is gonna be way easier.

When your social media and news apps have a few too many feeds…

This and That – Tree-mendous!

This post might make you board…

Why don’t trees have last names?
They like to go on a fir’s name basis.

Wooden you know it – my latest crafting achievement uses wood! You could say I’ve branched out and am trying new things.

I’ve been making wood bows which I will put on wood boxes – which The Car Guy will make for me. (I don’t have the courage yet to use the big saws…)

Each bow consists of five loops and four ‘ribbons’. I use a scroll saw to cut the pieces from a laminated wood blank. (I will eventually do a post that shows the step by step process.)

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes – even the most experienced carpenters will knot always get it right!

Wood you beleaf this rolling desk is made from wood and resin?

My daughter poured epoxy over a lovely piece of live edge lumber. The Car Guy framed the resulting piece in oak. Then he used it to make a top for this rolling table.

Wood you beleaf paper is made from trees?

I’m using my rolling table for paper quilling. I’m working on an octopus.

I’ve been a big fan of the Octopus since I read the book ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’. Here are my other octopus projects:

Scrumble – In an Octopus Garden

Octopus Stalks Red King Crab

Octopus in the Deep Dark Depths

Octopus Tangle

I would tell you my joke about paper, but it is actually quite tear-able.

Some of our spruce forest.

Western Canada is exporting forest fire smoke again this year. Here in Alberta, the most heart breaking fires are in the federal Rocky Mountain National Parks. Environmentalists are blaming climate change, but Smokey the Bear is as much to blame. Decades of preventing forest fires has resulted in an overload of dead wood – both in undergrowth and still standing trees. Areas that have not allowed logging to reduce overload, or have not created fire breaks, are most at risk.

Here at The Red House The Car Guy and I have spent the last five years cleaning out the downed deadwood and removing tree branches up to the 6 foot (about 2 metre) level. We also hire experts to take down dead trees. Hopefully this reduces the risk of catastrophic loss if there was a fire.

How do spruce trees knit? They use needles.

Last and Least:

Noah’s Ark was said to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high-  and made of gopher wood (which may or may not be a type of tree.)

 

Don’t leaf me hanging, tell me your wood puns!

It Looks Like a Duck, Right?

I heard the Secret Service had to change their commands. They can’t say “Get down!” anymore when the President is under attack. Now it’s “Donald, Duck!”
– Joke during Trump’s Presidency –

This looks like a duck, right? This is probably one of my best paper quill projects yet. I used a technique I haven’t used before – I outlined the larger elements in black paper strips, then filled them in with the coloured circles.

Maybe Something Good Will Now Happen

Much has been said about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and much more will be said when it becomes clear where the holes were in the Security system.

Perhaps the most positive part of the story is that it has opened a door. Right leaning voters who were reluctant to say they were conservative have decided they are no longer afraid of a personal ‘attack’ from those who lean left. (I do not know if people on the left side of the political spectrum fear some form of criticism if they say they are liberal.)

Of course, the verbal assaults and efforts to dehumanize the opposition might continue, but if enough people are willing to stand up and say, “I’ve had enough”, maybe there is hope that people can freely express their political affiliation without being vilified, cancelled or ostracized from family functions. Maybe the media will return to unbiased journalism…

In the World of Quackers:

A woman brought her duck to the vet because the duck was unresponsive. She was very worried. The vet performed his inspection – then turned to the woman and sadly told her: “I’m sorry but your duck passed away”. The woman, very distressed, insisted “I love my duck. How can you be so sure that he is no longer alive? You haven’t done any tests… he could be in a coma.” The vet left the room and came back with a labrador. The lab sniffed the duck from top to bottom, then turned to the vet and shook his head. The vet then left the room and came back with a cat. The cat sniffed the duck thoroughly, then turned to the vet and shook his head. The vet turned to the lady and said “Your duck did pass away: it’s now confirmed by our lab report and a cat scan.”

I wake up at the quack of dawn.

I went to the new petting zoo and saw the goats standing according to height, the pigs wallowing according to size, but try as they might, they couldn’t get all their ducks in a row.

My Grandpappy always said, “If it walks like a Duck, and talks like a Duck, it’s probably a man in a duck suit” Grandpappy sure liked his Moonshine!

Waddle you do if you forget?

What do you call a plastic yellow-feathered thief?
A robber ducky.

What do you call a duckling who opens his Christmas presents early?
A peeking duck!

For more of my stories about Ducks and Geese, click on Waterfowl.

My other Paper Quill Animals:

Sheep

Pig

Cow

Cats

Goldfish

Great Unexpecteds

Given the state of the world today, I don’t have Great Expectations for my grand children.
I got them all the other Dickens’ books though.
– Internet –

Living room – empty and ready for debugging.

I Did Not Expect This…

It started with a small pile of ‘something’ on the carpet in the living room. The Car Guy said it looked a bit like stuff you would see inside the vacuum cleaner. So I hauled out that appliance and vacuumed up the pile.

My roomba (robotic vacuum) went out my front door and a pack of bears attacked it, an eagle carried it away to the ocean, and a shark finished it off. Nature abhors a vacuum.
– Internet –

Two days later, there was another pile in the same location – for some reason, stuff was falling from the ceiling. For the next few days I laid sheets of paper on the floor to catch the debris – and eventually it became clear that whatever was up there was traveling on a defined path!

To make a long story short, nature, in the shape of medium size red/black ants had taken up residence in our ceiling. We hired an exterminator who sprayed the vaulted ceiling, the adjoining attics and the outside perimeter of the house. Job done – maybe… too soon to declare success.

The secret to true happiness is low expectations and insensitivity.
– Olivia Goldsmith –

I Should Have, But Did Not Expect This

Pristina, my 1985 Husqvarna sewing machine

I bought my second sewing machine in 1985. It was a Husqvarna and was one of the early electronic machines. It was perfect for our family. Our teenagers only had to push a couple of buttons and they were ready to sew. The machine did everything I used to have to do to coax a nice seam from the persnickety old Kenmore.

Me, confidently smiling while the machine is still in the box…

And then last week disaster struck. My trustworthy, 39 year old machine refused to do overcasting. It balked at anything thicker than 2 layers of material. The hand wheel broke. I assumed Pristina could be repaired, but sadly that was not the case. Parts were no longer available.

Fast forward to a few days ago. A new Husqvarna is now in my sewing/craft room. It will be some time before I figure out how to use it – and bond with it – sewing machine technology has advanced quite a bit in 40 years…

I Guess I Should Have Seen this Coming – Political Fearmongering – Perhaps no current politician has been the target of  fearmongering more than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic… MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love… They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies…
– Biden, Soul of the Nation Speech, September 2022-

Then the Biden-Trump debate happened and the ‘light of truth and shadow of lies’ kind of switched places. The Media Gaslighters who had spread and amplified the Democrat narratives about Trump began to understand that they had been gaslit by the politicians – Biden did not appear to be as mentally and physically fit as the media had been told and had chosen to believe.

A soul cleansing of sorts has started. Media (and fact checkers) have admitted to lying when they claimed that President Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.” They also admitted they lied when they said  Trump was telling people to drink disinfectants  (bleach) during Covid. It is hard to say how many other lies and half-truths they will admit to.

But is it Too Little, Too Late? A young man tried to Assassinate Donald Trump on July 13, 2024 – one innocent bystander is dead and two are badly wounded. 

People can argue that the Democrats and their supporting media are not to blame for the act of the shooter. That misses the point, which is the hatred so many people have for a man they have never met, who gives speeches they didn’t listen to, about party policies they have not looked into, reported by a biased media that hides the truth…

If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.
– Isa Blagden –

When someone lies to you, it’s because they don’t respect you enough to be honest, and they think you’re too stupid to not know the difference.

One mark of a deteriorating society is when people cannot discern between truth and lies. Another is that they don’t care and will believe whatever their itching ears want to hear.
– Cal Thomas –

Tomato Blood and Other Condiments

“Tomato Blood.” If you looked in your fridge, would you find a bottle of ‘tomato blood’ ketchup too? To be honest, I did not even notice that I had a container that was labelled that way until someone pointed it out to me!

Apparently this label only goes on ketchup  sold during the Halloween season. “Only the juiciest, ripest tomatoes were harmed in the making of delicious Heinz Tomato Blood Ketchup,” the company boasts.

Ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise could be the preferred condiments in your fridge too, but there are dozens of others that might live at your house, but not mine!

In my search of the internet for things to share with you about condiments, I found the following nearly useful (or useless) information!

Everyone knows that Old King Cole was a merry old soul, but few know about his mandate that all his subjects had to eat cabbage and mayonnaise.
It was Cole’s Law.

Hitting a golf ball correctly is the most sophisticated and complicated maneuver in all of sports, with the possible exception of eating a hot dog at a ball game without getting mustard on your shirt.
– Ray Fitzgerald –

I am the MacGyver of cooking. If you bring me a piece of bread, cabbage, coconut, mustard greens, pigs feet, pine cones…and a woodpecker, I’ll make you a good chicken pot pie.
– Si Robertson –

I saw a news report recently about how a certain thick, white, egg based condiment is secretly being manufactured using horse meat.
The FDA says to listen carefully when you open the jar because the tainted mayo neighs.

A very large shipment of mayonnaise was en route from England to Mexico on the ill fated ship the Titanic. 12,000 jars of the condiment  were to be delivered to Veracruz, Mexico. The Mexican people loved mayonnaise so much and were so devastated by the loss of the mayonnaise, that the Mexican people declared a National day of Mourning. It happens every year on the day the shipment was supposed to arrive. This day is, of course, May 5th – more commonly known as Sinko de Mayo.

My notion of an elegant table is you don’t leave the knife sticking out of the mayonnaise jar.
– Sue Grafton –

Show me a sexual practice that involves ice cubes and hot sauce, and I will show you a sexual practice that would be improved without them.
— Roger Ebert –

The fashion industry isn’t merely content to encase my meaty flanks in skintight denim. Oh, no! That denim also has to be white, a color that attracts ketchup, wine, garlic aioli, and any other foodstuffs I might otherwise be able to enjoy if I wasn’t wearing ridiculously tight pants.
– Diablo Cody –

What exactly are the ingredients of Ranch dressing? Mayo and disappointment?
– Jim Gaffigan –

When you go to a bar that has a black light, everybody looks cool. Except for me, because I was under the impression that the mustard stain came out.
– Mitch Hedberg –