I included lots of photos to make this post seem more interesting than it is

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Friday Photo Array

I’m plum out of ideas for blog posts lately. So let’s look through the photos on my phone and see if we can find anything remotely interesting.

(Why yes, I do realize it’s Saturday now. Shhhh. I’m in a very Late To Everything phase right now and it has apparently seeped over into blogging as well. As Carla kindly but firmly told me yesterday, as I was apologizing for dropping her off to an event more than 15 minutes late, I really need to “get it together.”)

This was Proof that I went for a walk on October 1. It has been so warm lately, and I’m so glad I loaded up on athletic shorts this summer. These are my favorite: they are so comfortable, and I like how they have the tight shorts with a pocket for my phone, but the floaty top layer so I don’t feel like I’m wearing a bathing suit. Strangely, though, I also really love these biker shorts. They are long enough that my thighs don’t chafe and they also have a pocket for my phone and they are very comfy. Anyway, I have been taking a page from Engie’s book and walking without listening to anything. I do still take my phone, though, and end up taking lots of pictures of the things I pass. I love these grasses; they are so fancy. Probably there’s some evolutionary/reproductive reason for their fanciness, but I enjoy them purely for the aesthetics.

I cannot resist photographing a pile of pumpkins. They are so pleasing! This particular pile was at the farmer’s market my family and I visited when my out-of-town friend was staying with us. Why don’t we ever go to the farmer’s market on our own? It was super charming and there were so many dogs. The only thing I bought was a bunch of icicle lettuce. It was so beautiful I couldn’t resist it.

Ah yes. I tried to take an artsy photo of the chicken soup I made as a post-surgery comfort offering. I do not like chicken noodle soup, and I did not enjoy making it as it involved dealing with bone-in, skin-on chicken. Ew. But the recipient seemed pleased, which is the important thing.

Cat in a box.

Carla loves to take random photographs with my phone. Someday I should do an entire post of the photos Carla takes. I’m guessing it will be an array of Leo shots, snaps of toys she wanted me to buy that I said “put that on your Christmas / birthday list,” and pictures of things she wants my mother to paint. This sky photo is one of the latter; she doesn’t 100% understand what makes a photograph paintable yet. But the cloud pattern was quite delicate and lovely, I’ll give her that.

This is one of the planters in my backyard. I quite like how it turned out and I took a picture of it so I can remember which plants to buy next year. I packed the planters so full of flowers and plants, and so many of them got swallowed up by the more showy plants. So next year I am sticking with Coleus, whatever this vine-y plant is, and the white and pink flowers. (Are they impatiens? I should probably figure out what they are.) The petunias just don’t do well. Those little blue flowers on the left weren’t a good fix next to the more voluminous foliage. I got some wonderful balloon flowers for some of the other planters, and they were too small to show up. Maybe I need to try to propagate some to keep inside my house; I think they are shade-loving flowers. I like this combo, and it seemed to thrive in both shade and sun.

Allison and I had a few exchanges about pork chops and how small the ones we can buy are compared to the ones the recipe wants us to cook. Like, no way is this pork chop an inch thick. (Confidential to Allison: I will never eat another pork chop without giggling like a twelve-year-old boy. Thank you for this gift.)

This cartoon showed up in my Instagram feed the day after I’d been awakened something like three times by the cat, and then a fourth time by my child who had similarly been awakened by the cat and was bringing him to me to complain that she couldn’t go back to sleep.

Leo’s main personality trait is that he is curious about everything. Obviously, he had to examine all the groceries as I unloaded them. (He is NOT ALLOWED on the counter.) (He does not recognize any of my arbitrary and stupid rules. He is The Cat and this is his house and there is no place he will not go.)

Another in-car Carla photograph. It took me a minute to understand why she took this picture. Ah yes. The temperature. She is very, very deep into Gen Alpha slang these days. At an appointment recently, her doctor said something about “16 or 17” and Carla looked at me and whispered “six seven” and of course her doctor overheard so I had to explain what “six seven” means and, since it doesn’t mean anything, and since neither the doctor nor I listen to Skrilla or do Tik Tok, the doctor only got more and more confused and I felt like an idiot.

I made sandwiches for Carla’s sports team and this was the photo I took when I ran out of bread and needed to text my friend to bring me another loaf. Am not so good with the maths.

Carla and my husband and I went for a walk and Carla wanted to pose on this bench near the pond.

Leo is working on his strength training.

My dad taught me how to change the oil in my car this week! It’s something he’s been trying to teach me for decades, but I’ve only recently understood how useful a skill it would be to have… and how nice of a bonding experience with my dad it would be. It was much simpler a process than I anticipated. I also made a HUGE mess the first time I released the drain plug, and dropped the drain plug in that tub of oil. Fortunately, my dad had a cool magnetic tool that I could use to fish the plug out. I feel very Let Me Change All the Oil now, while the information is fresh in my mind. Of course, since it’s not a weekly project, I will probably have forgotten everything by the time I need to do it again. (Need me to change your oil?)

One of the hiking trails I frequent with a friend is in full fall bloom. The profusion of flowers is spectacular and we stopped frequently to take pictures and look up the names of the blossoms.

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Digital Grouse

Technology and I are not getting along.

My WordPress blog – which I have had since 2009 (am v. old) – is now suddenly not working correctly. The platform claims that I am trying to access WordPress via an unsupported browser, but when I click on the list of supported browsers, the link does not work. If I google which browsers support/are supported by WordPress, I am assured that Safari, which I use, is in fact fully supported. Do I have to update it or something? Maybe. But that opens a whole other can of worms wherein my computer claims it has no memory left and then I spent 80 hours trying to clear everything off of my hard drive even though the portion of the bar graph that is taking up the most memory is invisible stuff I cannot access or erase.

Yes, in fact, I DO feel very unsupported. (For this post, I have switched to Chrome, which I dislike for unknown but very strongly felt reasons.)

While we’re badmouthing WordPress – which I don’t WANT to do; I have been happy with it these long years – it is also doing a thing where I will create a post and then suddenly it says there has been an unexpected error and I cannot access the post nor edit it. There is no further information offered; none of the buttons next to this message go anywhere or do anything. Well. This finally justifies my long habit of writing posts in Word first, and then copy/paste-ing them into my blog – and I have not lost any content as of yet. But it is STILL ANNOYING.

That’s all I get: “unexpected.” And yet it keeps happening… so… at what point does it become expected?

On to the next grouse: There is too much spam. Many of my blog followers are spam accounts. I delete them and they sign right back up. Why? Why? What are you getting out of following my blog, moneybiz2020 and Buy CBD Oils UK?

I mean, Dickie B looks super nice but his email address, and, frankly, the fact that he is subscribed to my particular blog, leads me to believe he is NOT A REAL HUMAN.

Bots are constantly following my Instagram account, too. They are all the same: names like “the_agile_walrus893” and then there’s a profile image of a beautiful young woman who has a very American-Sitcom-Character-type name and lists her Totally Normal City and her astrological sign and something Totally Normal (umbrella lover! anorak collecter! beet sniffer!) about her. And then the account is filled with dozens of exotic travel photos – featuring zero people who look remotely similar to the woman pictured in the profile – and the photo captions are always emojis. And the bots follow lots of people! And lots of people follow the bot accounts! And I delete/block them every time I see them but ARRRRGGGGHHHH. Why? WHY? What in the name of Jeff Bezos are the bots getting out of these interactions?????????

This is not a real human. Right? RIGHT?
Why do these bots have SO MANY followers??? Are they all just following each other? And if so, WHY?

And I am getting TONS of spam emails lately, too. Not just the normal emails from Athleta and my local library and Barnes & Noble – the ones I signed up for, which nonetheless sometimes feel like spam. But emails from websites I definitely did not visit nor give my information to. Like GQ Magazine. Or some life insurance company I may have requested a quote from once, via telephone, a literal DECADE ago. Clicking unsubscribe, of course, does NOTHING. The emails keep coming.

I don’t have a photo of my inbox because I think you might faint if you see the number of unread emails I have.

Somehow I accidentally clicked the Apple TV app on my computer and now it refuses to leave. I have regular quit. I have force quit. I have turned my computer off and on again. It is always in the background, doing… whatever it is doing. (Something nefarious, I’m sure.)

Likewise with Adobe Flash Player. It constantly pops up on my desktop even though I SWEAR I have deleted it from my hard drive multiple times. It’s hiding somewhere deep in my computer, though, and I cannot root it out, and it keeps popping up and telling me to update.

Speaking of updates: My password manager asks me to update it weekly. At least. HOW does it require so many updates? HOW? And why? Just pick a version and stick with it! For a month, at least! (Edited to add: After I drafted this and tried to shut down my computer, the password manager asked me to update it again. It reads my blog, y’all. SIGH. I did it, but we’ll see how long it lasts.)

Last grouse (at least, for today): when I go to the Instagram website via my laptop, it quite frequently pretends as though I have asked it to display something mythical and non-existent. I am simply typing “Instagram.com” in the browser and hitting enter so please do not pretend like this a site that does not exist.

SOMETHING’S BROKEN, ALL RIGHT. Also, I love how it says “go back to instagram” as though I am not already there.

If I didn’t use technology every second of every day, I would say goodbye so fast…

Actual grouse, whose incredulity mimics my feelings exactly. (image from Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources)