Sandy and I attended The Bionic Ball on Friday evening. This is an annual event held by my Orthopedic surgeon’s clinic, celebrating all of the people who had a total joint replacement in the past year. Not everyone gets an invitation–they have a drawing–so we were lucky enough to get picked. It was held at The Club at Strawberry Creek, a really nice venue on a golf course just West of I-94 just off of Highway 50 in Kenosha. We had previously attended a wedding there before.

It was a pretty nice evening of food, drink, and dancing–though Sandy and I skipped the dancing part. It was interesting to meeting many other people who had joints replaced and to hear their experiences. There were round tables setup with 8 people per table. Sandy and I came a little early, so we chose an empty table and sat down by ourselves. The place soon filled up though, and our table consisted of two people with knee replacements (including me), a guy who had both hips replaced, and another guy who had one shoulder replaced and is going to have the other should replaced in a couple weeks. And all of us brought a date–my wife, the other knee’s wife, one-shoulder’s daughter, and two-hips’ date. Two-hips is a chef who teaches classes. Here’s his website: Intorno Alla Tavola. The other knee replacement is retired, and one-shoulder is a carpenter.

Everyone else provided some entertaining conversation throughout the evening, including Sandy. I was pretty quiet, as usual. The food was very good–pasta, chicken, vegetables and potatoes, including drinks and desserts. The entertainment was a jazz band, and they were very good as well.

The one thing I found most fascinating about the evening was how everyone had a cell phone and captures their life experiences on them and is ready to share them at will. “Back in the day” a guy would pull out his wallet and take out the photos of his kids or family and show them off. These days, people just bring up the photos on their cell phone and pass the phone around the table for everyone to see. The best deer that “one-shoulder” shot while hunting, and the “even better” one that got away and has never been seen again… The hunting hides he’s built, etc. He even asked how long my scar was from my knee replacement and Sandy ask me if I had those photos on my phone, so I pulled up the “Jim’s Total Knee Replacement” photo album and handed it to him, explaining that my scar is almost completely gone now. That’s all pretty natural for everyone these days, especially with me being in I.T., but I don’t get out much, so I found it interesting to note.

The other “one-knee” at our table sat next to me, but didn’t talk much. He and his wife were older than the rest of us and didn’t talk much. He seemed like he was doing fine with his new knee though.

This is a flashback to April 7th, 2017. We went to see Rogue One at Tinseltown in Kenosha that day. Watching Rogue One, then coming home and watching A New Hope brought back some very fond Star Wars memories for me. I first saw it when by brother-in-law Bob got it on a huge laserdisc. I remember thinking it cost a fortune, though I don’t remember how much. According to the internet, the first version of A New Hope (the first home video release of ANY Stars Wars film) was released on VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc and VideoDisc in May of 1982. Since I’m a little rusty on the years and how old I was, I’ll have to just trust this is accurate, which would have made me 19 years old. Anyway, at that time I often babysat for my nieces, Linda and Melissa (Missy) while my sister Penny and her husband Bob worked. I remember a video store in Market Square mall, which was located where the Kenosha Job Center is today. That mall also housed a theater and my favorite arcade–Funway Freeway. I remember the price of that Star Wars VHS movie when it was released, it was $99. Movies were crazy-expensive back then…and that was on TAPE!

Having Star Wars as an entertainment option back then was pretty exciting though. Linda, Missy and I watched it often and enjoyed it each and every time, learning and memorizing all we could. They even had a lot of the Star Wars toys, including many action figures. I remember “Gramma Tarkin”, Missy’s version of “Gran Moff Tarkin” and “Jabba Wah Neechie Ko Wah Boo Shahnee Wan Tawnie Wan Yoska” from the cantina scene. Repeating and those phrases many times over the years burned them into my brain like the Baby Shark song does today. Luckily, however, Baby Shark will fade eventually (or so I hope) like most others do. But I continue to try to retain my good nerdy Star Wars memories ‘to infinity and beyond!’ LOL

For the past several days we were warned that a huge storm was coming. This storm was to bring several inches of very heavy snow and rain. The days prior were mostly comfortably warm, including Friday, the day before the storm. I was very tempted to cut the grass, or have Kevin cut the grass, which would be the first time it was cut this spring, but I decided to hold off. It was right at that point where it’s just slightly overgrown, but since it hasn’t been cut the first time yet, it’s still filling in nicely. So I let it ride and skipped the mowing.

The Kenosha-Racine area was supposed to get the worst of it, 4-7 inches of snow was what the weather services warned we would get. After our last winter storm I had let the snowblower run once I finished clearing the sidewalk and driveway, since there wasn’t much gas left in it, until it ran out on it’s own and died, then I tucked it away, comfortably, in the back of the garage for next Winter.

Well, with all of the anticipation and warnings we got, yesterday morning I decided it would be better to be safe than sorry, so I dug it back out and had it ready to go again. We were totally out of gas in our container as well, so I went to the gas station and picked up two gallons of Regular. I didn’t fill the snowblower yet, I figured I’d wait until I was actually going to use it before taking that plunge, but I had the two gallons at the ready. If I didn’t use it for the snowblower, I can still use it for the lawnmower.

1:00 PM to 10:00 PM was the timeframe they specified, and right around 1:30 PM I noticed the first snow beginning to fall. Sandy and I went out for dinner at 5:00 PM at The Phoenix on Highway 50, just West of I-94 — a very nice family restaurant, and by that time it was coming down pretty heavy and starting to cover the grass. It was very heavy and slushy on the sidewalk and roads but not as bad as most of our Winter storms tend to be, and nowhere near as extreme as they warned it would be, in my opinion. But that’s a good thing–better to be ready for the worst. After supper I decided to wait until morning to snowblow, since there was only slush on the sidewalks and driveway.

I think this is a pretty rare occurence. I just took this photo out our front door. There were no plow noises overnight, no salt trucks out. The roads and sidewalks appear to be clear and dry, all by themselves. I’ll tuck the snowblower back in the back of the garage again today. I think I made the right call not pouring the gas into it yesterday. I don’t have the usual level of stress I do when everything is covered in snow and I know I have to get out there and clear it out–at least the end of the driveway that gets heavily plowed-in by morning–so it feels pretty nice to just relax and enjoy the view with a hot cup of coffee.

The puppies, on the other hand, don’t seem to like it so much:

They refused to leave the sidewalk slab and wouldn’t even step into the snow at all. After a few minutes, Shadow looked up at me with his puppy-dog eyes and his nose was white from sniffing the snow. Reminded me a little of Tony Montana in Scarface at that moment! LOL.

Then there’s the poor cars:

Kevin and Sandy will have to clean their cars off this morning before they go to work… Mine? I think I’ll let it melt and see if it’s all cleared off naturally by the time I need to go somewhere again.

At one time in the past I had intended to log every single walk I took, expecting to eventually travel walk the distance in miles of a trip to Phoenix, Arizona. Since that “dream” I have gone through multiple walk-tracking apps and have changed the way that I track my walks several times.

Things always change it seems. I used to be content with starting up a tracking app and then stopping it at the end of my walk, then posting that to Facebook, but I’d sometimes forget to start the app at the beginning of my walk, so it would only have half or a portion of my walk recorded, or none at all if I finished my walk before I remembered I forgot to start the app.

Today, Google Fit takes care of everything. It knows when I’m walking and when I’m not, and it tracks what it can automatically via GPS. The rest, like when I’m walking indoors at Vista, still gets tracked but only as steps and distance without a map. Even any photos I take are included in my timeline. And I earn “Move Minutes” and “Heart Points” as well, which is Google’s way of trying to keep me motivated.

I still post my walks to Facebook occasionally, but only when I feel the distance is exceptional or if I took a decent photo along the way and feel like sharing it. I might just stop the Facebook posting of my walks entirely though, and start posting them over here instead. I can never find what I’m looking for on Facebook for some reason. There just seems to be too much clutter and inconsistency there these days. I can look at my newsfeed on Facebook and then refresh it and every single time it shows me something different. Is it “rotating” recent posts? Sometimes I see posts from yesterday, sometimes today. The only way, it seems, to see everything the same way consistently is to actually go to a specific friend’s timeline. At least THAT doesn’t seem to change until they post something new. And what’s the deal with posting to your “News Feed” or to “Your Story”? It doesn’t some weirdly different stuff when you post to “Your Story” and it drives me nuts. I think they need a “Simple” version for us fogies that works and appears just like a blog. Predictable, add-free, simple. Wait a minute, I have one of those!

Don’t get me wrong, I like options. I’m a huge Android fan and not a Apple fan for just that reason. But Facebook got bloated and off-the-rails a long time ago and never stopped. I’m a big fan of Reddit now (thanks, Mike!) and find everything there much more interesting as a daily stop-and-browse site. I would even be fine with quitting Facebook entirely if I didn’t have so many friends and relatives still on it.

So what was my point with this post? My walks? Facebook? Reddit? I don’t really know. Just ranting I suppose. Filling my site with more content. Or gibberish, or maybe even flibbertigibbet, whichever you prefer.

On my way to work this morning at about 6:20 AM I was driving South on Lewis Avenue through Beach Park when several emergency vehicles approached from both directions. I pulled over and watched as they began blocking the intersections behind and in front of me. After they passed, I pulled up to the next intersection and they were allowing vehicles to go through going South, away from the area, so I continued on toward work, but I kept watching the cross-streets to try to see what was going on. Obviously something was up. As I passed one intersection I noticed a while cloud of what I thought was fog crossing the road down the road to the West. I thought nothing of it, assuming it was just morning fog as I’ve seen this many times before.

As it turned out, there was an accident on Green Bay Road and 29th Street, to my West, and a truck carrying ammonia was involved, spilling or leaking a great deal of ammonia from its tanks. That was the fog I saw… a cloud of ammonia. I have included a few links below. The one from NBC Chicago has a pretty good drone or helicopter video of the area covered in that “fog”. Click here for that one.

Chemical spill in Beach Park sends 37 to hospitals, 7 remain in critical condition

I’m kind of excited for Stephen King’s new book, which comes out September 10th, 2019. Entertainment Weekly recently published an excerpt. Take a look.

I made a huge mistake with my website recently. I have been getting alerts from my WordPress installation recently that I need to update my PHP to version 7. My site has been on PHP 5.5 since I moved to WordPress several years ago, but now, it seems, PHP has come a long way, and WordPress is insisting I update it. I assumed that eventually WordPress would require PHP 7, so it would stop working after I updated it one of these times, crippling my website.

Since these alerts started appearing, I have been looking all over my host’s admin panel in search of options for PHP, but was unsuccessful. So I decided to start looking elsewhere, and with Leo Laporte’s constant recommendation to use WordPress.com as a host for WordPress sites, I figured I’d try it out. Well, that little experiment lasted less than a day. I had chosen the “Premium” plan, which is one step up from “Personal”, their lowest paid tier, so I figured it would offer enough of the options I needed. As it turned out, for starters all of the site’s money amounts were in Polish “zloty” values instead of US dollars, so I had to use Google to convert the values to USD so I knew what I was getting into. I looked past that and tried to move on, figuring if that’s the worst issue I have, I’l be fine. Next I found that with the plan I chose I can’t use Plugins. None. Nada. Nothing. And I’m stuck with WordPress branding on my website. Sure, my plan removes all WordPress ADs, but apparently branding isn’t considered an ad. Then there’s the e-mail. I had this crazy notion that ALL HOSTING included e-mail accounts. HA! WordPress.com includes no e-mail whatsoever. They give you instructions on how to setup e-mail with another host–and they even recommend several good ones–but WordPress.com doesn’t have e-mail accounts. Period.

Well, that was the last straw. And stupid me didn’t even go the slow route–I went ahead an transferred my domain to them during this whole process! So now I’m a bit stuck. They say my domain is locked for 60 days, per ICANN, after any transfer, and can’t be moved until after that. Whoops. I e-mailed support at WordPress and asked if there’s any way to unlock it sooner. I saw that the site on my host also have a lock option, but I have the ability to remove that to allow the domain to be transferred. That might not apply for new transfers though, but we’ll see what they say.

So, desperate for another option, I did a web search for how to upgrade PHP on my host’s site, and there it was. There is an option in the “CGI and scripting language support” section in my admin panel with my host that says very simply: “Select the version of PHP that will be run for files with a .php extension” along with a dropdown containing 5 PHP versions from 5.3 to 7.1. I switched to 7.1 immediately and went back to my self-hosted WordPress site’s admin section. Whaddayaknow, the alerts werer gone. Problem solved. Except…

Yup, now I’m a little messed up. My domain name was transferred to WordPress.com and I don’t want it there, I want it back where it was. WordPress.com as a 30-day refund policy, so the first thing I did, once my domain transfer was completed at WordPress.com, was to change the DNS addresses back to MY host, which still hosts my same old site (which is now on PHP 7.1) and cancelled my subscription to WordPress.com. I guess this will allow it to function properly for 60 days until I can transfer it back, but I was in a little bit of a panic for awhile there, wondering if my site might be offline for 60 days, stuck in the ether without a home. Not that it would have been the end of the world for my site… I’m sure I’ve gone over 60 days without a new posting many times over the years. After several days (not a good turnaround time for hosting support) WordPress.com finally responded to my question about unlocking my domain before the 60 days, and I was told that it’s a ICANN requirement (as I already knew) and there’s no way around it–I have to wait the 60 days. So I marked my calendar. My site should be fine though–at least it’s pointing to the right place.

In the end, my site is basically just a glorified “portal” to other sites and a sort of journal where i can practice my writing (and bitching) skills anyway. I don’t advertise anything and I don’t expect anyone to visit besides me. If they do, they’re perfectly welcome, and I’m always aware that everything here is 100% public and I have curated it completely. So, if you’re reading this and you’re not me, WELCOME! You are among very few who stumble into this little corner of the interwebs. Enjoy the posts, check out the photos and videos too…but they’re not actually here, they’re sitting on much more popular sites like Flickr and YouTube…but I made em, that’s my (our) stuff. And this is still one of the last remaining ad-free, popup-free, non-malware-infested websites in cyberspace, and that’s the way I intend to keep it.

Well, the puppies are taking shape. We now trust them enough to let them sleep with us instead of in their pen. They seem incredibly happy about this, especially at bedtime, and they’ve adapted to it very nicely. When I get up to use the restroom in the middle of the night they do too, running right to their pad (or outside if it’s warm enough) and do their business, then we all go back to bed at the same time and snuggle up again.

Our grandkids Haylie and Connor spent the weekend here recently, and the puppies tried sleeping with them, but they didn’t last long. Haylie said they were just too hot, so she made them leave the bed. She’s not kidding either. Those little buggers are like space heaters in bed. I almost always sleep on top of the covers because I get too hot under them, and now, with the puppies in bed, I still get too hot even on top of the covers.

They’re still struggling with pad training though. As far as urinating goes, they’re nearly perfect and only sometimes miss the pad, but only due to bad aim. Pooping is another matter. For some reason, about 1/2 the time they’ll drop it somewhere other than the pad and think nothing of it. We’re not sure if they’re trying to mark an area because there’s two dogs in the house, or just trying to get attention. We try to look past it and not scold, and simply discourage the bad habits by not treating them, but I don’t think we catch them pooping on the pad often enough to reward the good behavior. We’ll get there though. And right around that time the weather will get good consistently enough to where we’ll be totally retraining them to do their business completely outside without a pad at all, unless they’re penned for a few hours, or in case of emergencies, like Socks was trained to do.