We feel more secure now. I hear all the stories about the issues with Ring devices–how hackers easily break in, how they partner with the Police Department to make neighborhoods more secure, but how that’s supposedly a bad thing, etc. etc.. But I’ve found most of the negative things be unfounded, and a few other apparent “issues” have two or more sides to them. You can look at them as being good or bad, or positive in some ways and negative in others. And either way, all of the conversation about them has only served to educate more and more people and helps improve the products and the company as they evolve and adapt their services and products.

As far as our situation goes, we went a bit beyond what most people do, just for extra protection and redundancy. I’m not going into it further than that though, you know what “loose lips” do.

Anyway, In such little time I’ve learned a lot. Things like when, exactly, the paper-person delivers our paper in the morning…and exactly what he’s wearing. I think he’s cycled through his entire wardrobe already at least once. When the mailman (-person?) delivers our mail. When our fire hydrant is flushed. When each neighbor walks his or her dog(s) – boy, Shadow and Tiger REALLY make sure we know when THAT is. But even when they miss one, we see it. What time of day the tree shadows are just right to trigger motion at our back door. When the weeds in the front yard need to be cut because they’re triggering more of those motion alerts. And if there’s even an accident at our intersection, I’ll have it fully recorded and on the channel 6 news well before the next day’s paper comes out.

The puppies had their first (and hopefully ONLY) major fight the other day, and we were able to go back and determine pretty much exactly what happened and how they brawled. Take a look, it’s interesting.

Then there’s the critters that apparently come out at night and frequent our driveway and garage. Racoons, spiders and dragonflies, oh my! There’s at least a couple of cats that cut through our driveway at least once or twice most nights, as well as a few stray dogs and even a fox now and then, not to mention the racoons and bunnies.

And the road work that proceeds at a snail’s pace in the street in front of our house. Whenever something changes I go back and see when and what they did. But at least we can see pretty much everything surrounding our house and yard, so both Sandy and I are very happy at this point. This also means neither one of us an get away with anything ourselves either. We’ve both already caught and questioned each other when we do something the other isn’t aware of. I won’t get into any more detail than that, but there is that “downside”, if you want to call it that. We think it’s fine though–it’ll keep us more honest.

It’s such a comfort to be able to let the dogs outside to play, then sit down and watch a movie or TV show and monitor the dogs in the backyard at the same time, just to know they’re ok. We know exactly when they’re back at the door and ready to come in too. We set up our “control panel tablets” (one upstairs and one downstairs) with Alexa and Ring, then set the motion alert ringtones on them for back door motion to be a bunch of barking puppies. We never miss when they’re ready to come in anymore.

Call me a geek one more time. Go ahead. Do it.