We've Moved!

Well its finally happened. After writing a long post this morning, then not being able t o upload photos in Blogger, my patience came to a swift and long-contemplated end.

I have transferred Natural Notes II to Wordpress, and I'm done here. It was a painless transition. I still have to learn the little do's and don'ts of Wordpress, but hey, it just imported my entire blog with most of the pictures in just a few minutes. Can't beat that in a month of Bloggers.

Hope you will all stop by. Thanks for the support and the comments.

Find Natural Notes 3 Here

The Wonders of DSL

I'm BACK! It started innocently enough - some static on the phone lines. A little slow on the internet, and the Blogger screen sitting quietly without moving on my monitor. Frustration led to my hitting the "end task" button more times than I can count. I gave up entirely and swore I was ditching Blogger forever. I chalked the problems up to holiday internet traffic.

Then came Monday morning. Same problem, but less static. Then a weird thing began to happen. The DSL would go out whenever my phone rang. The internet was slower than the proverbial molasses. Finally, I got smart and called the phone company.

An hour after the service/repair tech arrived, my computer is moving so fast it's smoking and I'm dizzy from the screens flying by! The culprit - something the size of an AA battery called a modulator in the box outside. Apparently it had "grounded" and the moles were getting my DSL signal - or something like that anyway.

How pathetic is it that I can't survive a week without blinding speed internet without being on the verge of a nervous breakdown?

Fisher Find!

Our local paper yesterday had a front page story that finally got my attention (most other times, not so much).

A fisher (member of the martin family) has been discovered and photographed in Stokes State Forest - parts of which are right across the road. The area in which the fisher was photographed is a few miles away by car. By fisher? Who knows.

This is not the actual photograph taken - this is one borrowed from Wikipedia, so you can see what a fisher looks like. Think gigantic mink.

The photograph was set up by a graduate student from Montclair State College, who thought that a particular area of Stokes was prime fisher habitat. He rigged a motion-sensored digital camera to a tree, used some fisher-attracting scent bait, and was rewarded with a shot early in October of a fisher investigating the bait.

This is big news for the area, as fishers were extirpated from this area more than 100 years ago. The thought is that this one (and if there's one, there's probably more) are migrants from either New York or PA (um, now that's a logical assumption. I'm sure they didn't just fall out of the sky!).

Rob was incredulous, having never heard of a fisher before, which in itself pretty much amazed him. I suggested it was because they aren't found in NJ. Well, not until now anyway. He said, "we don't have polar bears here either, but I've heard of them. Why haven't I ever heard of a fisher?" Good point. No clue.

He got on the internet and looked at the pictures of fishers, which can weigh up to 15 pounds and reach a length of more than three feet from nose to tail. His comment was, if he'd come across THAT while alone in the woods, he would have thought it was the Jersey Devil.

Relaxation

Long time, no blog. I've been spending time writing other things - working on my NaNoWriMo project (which of course, I'll never finish by Nov. 30, but I'm having fun anyway and finding out I really can write fiction) and with my Mom, who will be 90 years old in February, and who just underwent major surgery. She's fine now, but needs someone with her all the time. She's staying with my sister, who needed a bit of a break yesterday, so I went there to be with my Mom. We had a really nice day together.

Blogger wouldn't play nice earlier in the week, so I gave up trying. It put me in one of those "maybe I'll keep this going and maybe I won't" moods. Still undecided. Need more coffee.

And since I've got nothing else intelligent to say, I'll close with another raccoon picture from Rob. He calls this one "Relaxation."

Really Nothing

I think I have nothing interesting to write about this morning. Blogger was wonky again yesterday, when I was trying to post and now, whatever inspiration I had then is long gone. I spent some time yesterday taking the 100s of pictures I had stored on this computer, and saving them to CDs. Not that I needed the drive space - this computer seems to be monstrous as far as what it will hold - but it seemed like a good idea anyway. I spent some time looking for an online photo storage system, because it would make life easier with Blogger, or so I've heard. I have one freebie account at Picturetrail, but it's full. I like pbase (not free) and of course there's Flickr, which I haven't really researched yet. Any suggestions?

I did come across this photo I had stored in Picturetrail. This was taken last summer in Kentucky. It's Tucker, asleep in the what used to be a flower bed, before the puppies dug out all the flowers. You're looking straight down on an upside down and obscenely sprawled sound asleep cat in the dirt.

And here's one of the diggers - Joe Dirt - asleep under the porch steps after a rampage of tearing out the flowers. Just your typical summer afternoon in the south.

Blogger was super-fast at uploading these photos from Picturetrail, so maybe an online storage system is the answer. I'm just a little leary of trusting all of my pictures to some outside site that could go away, taking my photos with them. Guess I just need to buy more CDs.

See? Told you I had nothing interesting to say this morning!

Coming to Times Square

This is Rob's photo that will be shown on the big screen at Times Square on November 17. It's very simple - just his wife holding a bouquet of daisies, but apparently the people at Kodak liked it well enough.

I like it too, but I can't say it's my favorite of the ones he has in his collection right now. I love the barn pictures he does, and of course the wildlife.

He has a gift for artistic composition, and he does a lot of nice things with lighting.

Of course, he has inherited all of this talent from his mother...

Zowie!

Just got an email from my son Rob. He just received word from an editor at Kodak that one of two photographs he submitted to them was chosen to be the Picture of the Day for Nov. 17, and will appear on the big screen in Times Square in NYC every few mintues throughout the day. Zowie!