I had an amusing experience last weekend. I purchased a 65″ 4K TV from a Kenosha store. For several days beforehand I had shopped around, electronically, to find the best one that fit our budget. Once I found a few, I had to dig up the actual BOX size and make sure it would fit into my car. I knew it would be close, but according to the box dimensions on the TV manufacturer’s website, it would just fit into my car with the rear seats folded down.

So I took the plunge and made the purchase online. Once that was done and the TV was set aside at the store, I went to pick it up. It was fairly light, considering its size – 39 lbs without its stand. I was presented the TV on a dolly, but told they can’t give me the dolly unattended, it has to be accompanied by one of their staff. So someone from shipping & receiving wheeled it out to my car and assisted me. Guess what? The box dimensions on the manufacturer’s site just happened to be a few inches off. The box definitely wouldn’t fit into my car. The width was way wider than my car’s available space. Pretty frustrating. We tried to get it into the side doors too, but it was still too big. With no other options now that the TV was purchased. I asked the employee if he’d help me unbox it. He agreed, so we unboxed the TV, carefully, right there in the parking lot. The TV itself fit very comfortably into my car.

The employee then said he’s not allowed to take back the box and throw it away. I need to keep it in case I need to return the TV in the future. He suggested we try to fold it up, so we took all of the Styrofoam and cardboard that was surrounding the TV in the box and folded and broke it apart, then set it all on top of the TV in the car. The box itself actually folder up pretty easily once it was empty, and that was also stuffed into the back of the car. So with the car packed full of TV and packing materials, I thanked the employee for his help and he went back into the store with his dolly and I drove home.

Once I got home it was pretty easy to remove all of the packing and put it away, then carry the TV into the house by myself. Sandy held the gate and door open, which helped a bit, and the job was done, no pickup or van needed–luckily. Game of Thrones never looked so good!

I remember almost every square inch of our family’s backyard growing up. How it evolved and changed over the years, our old garage, which seemed huge when I was a kid, used as our “fort” when we played “guns” with all of my friends in the neighborhood… Yes, back then it was perfectly harmless and normal to play cops & robbers or cowboys and indians with your friends using toy guns and fake rubber knives. But I digress.

I played with all of my toys back there–the big Tonka trucks (made out of actual metal, not the crappy plastic all the toys are made with nowadays), my vast Hot Wheels collection (eventually totally destroyed with I matured a little more and explored fire and destruction with a vengeance…)

We even had some of our Cub Scout meetings back there. My mom was our Den Mother. That yard, along with the house I, and my entire family, grew up in, was my entire life. A few large tents were raised in our backyard as well, at some point. I believe these were part of Boy Scout training that my two big brothers were a part of. I never made it to Boy Scouts myself, I can’t remember exactly why, but Cub Scouts was apparently enough for me. This might have been the last my parents or just my mother had anything to do with Scouts. I remember her having a difficult time with me and my friends during Cub Scout events. She may have gotten fed up with it altogether, I can’t remember.

Our garage was a “fort” for my friends and I, and we often rearranged it, had old couches, chairs and even a bed in there sometimes and “camped out” in it. That old garage began leaning at some point, and seemed like it would just fall right over, but it never did. I had dreams that it did, as well as dreams of our family house doing the same, but that never happened either.

But back to the backyard. I remember us having a large burner back there in the Northeast corner of the backyard near our alley, where we would burn our trash. I was taught in Cub Scouts how to put out a small fire by stomping it out. So when a large piece of newspaper fell out of the burner, burning, I tried to stop it out with my foot. I don’t recall who else was at home and/or in the yard at the time, but as I was trying to stomp out the burning newspaper, the pant leg of my jeans caught on fire. I kept stomping and shaking it, trying to put it out, but I was panicking as it kept burning. Someone tackled me to the ground and got the fire out at some point and either got my dad, or my dad tackled me and put out the fire. Either way, my leg was badly burned. He carried me into our little green van and rushed me to the hospital. I still have the scar on my lower left leg, now long-faded, but still visible as a reminder. I’ll always remember how much worse that could have ended up, had someone not jumped into action immediately and put out the fire.

We had several swimming pools in that backyard as well. There was always a huge circular dip in one area of the yard where our pool had once been for quite some time. I’m guessing this was dug out to make the pool deeper for diving and swimming, but I can’t quite remember. I just remember the indentation at that spot, and a sapling was eventually planted right in the middle of it, which grew into a nice-sized tree over the years. That was out next to the garage. I also remember us having a pool close to the house for a long time as well. I loved swimming as kid, and we often swam in my Uncle Sylvester’s huge pool out in the county on Tobin Road. His house was right next to my grandpa’s house, whom we’d visit every Sunday. We had other smaller pools as well over the years in that backyard, and sometimes even big sandboxes made out of those old pools. The smaller, hard plastic pools, that is. They made for neat sandboxes for us to play in. My dad even managed to have a truckload of sand brought in to fill them. My mom would babysit several kids for extra money, so there would always be plenty of kids around to play in the backyard.

Later on, when all of the kids were grown up and gone, my dad had the old garage removed and a new one built, customized just the way he wanted it for his van, and half of the backyard was cemented so he would have a full turnaround area for his van, picnicking, and whatnot. We had many cookouts back there throughout the years, eventually we began calling them “Steakouts” because we always had to have steaks–my dad’s favorite meal. Even if we had hot dogs, brats, and burgers, my dad insisted on a steak for himself. Sure, he’d eat brats and burgers… in addition to his steak.

My dad also ended up with a large shed back there as well, next to the garage, in the spot the new tree and burner once were. I guess his huge new garage still wasn’t big enough to hold all of his junk. He was a real rummage sale addict, bringing home everyone else’s cast-away junk to add to his own. His shed was packed full of stuff, including a bed and a desk at one point. I guess he, or someone else, camped out in there once in awhile too. I guess theses days he’d be called a “hoarder”, but not quite to the extremes you see today on the TV show of the same name.

Shadow and Tiger, our two Chihuahua puppies, are littermates, yet they have two distinctly different head-types. Shadow is a “Applehead” Chihuahua and Tiger is a “Deerhead” Chihuahua. I find this fascinating. I don’t even recall which type their mother was, but I saw her when we picked them up. The owner may have mentioned the head-type that their father was too, but I don’t recall that either. I should have taken notes, darn it. Anyway, here’s what the experts say on the history of the two Chihuahua head types:

Somewhere throughout the Chihuahua’s history, the breed separated into two variations: the apple head and deer head. We don’t when this genetic evolution occurred, nor do we know how. Pre-Columbian artifacts discovered in Central America depict small dogs with both apple and deer-shaped heads, suggesting this evolutionary split occurred before the Europeans discovered the New World.

Some breed experts theorize that a small ancient dog known as the Techichi is the Chihuahua’s true ancestor, while the deer head variety is a cross between the Techchi and the Chinese Crested. Others believe the Techichi is the deer head’s true ancestor. Regardless of how it happened, there are now apple head and deer head Chihuahuas.

In addition to this, they say: Don’t assume that breeding two apple head Chihuahuas will result in a litter of all apple heads, or vise-versa for deer heads. When breeding two Chihuahua of the same variety, there’s always a chance that one or more puppies in their litter will be the opposite variety.

So I guess no matter which type of head the mother and the father had, they could always have ended up as they are now. It’s just the luck of genetics, just like human babies. I was just curious if it’s rare to have both types in the same litter, but it sounds like it’s not.

But if their head-type is any indication of intelligence, so far (for us at least) the deer-head seems somewhat less intelligent than the apple-head. Tiger is pretty “wimpy” compared to Shadow and is very much a follower and not a leader. He’s learning, but much slower, it seems, that Shadow. That goes for both pad-training and command training. I think he’s learning a lot just from watching his brother, then he eventually starts doing them properly himself. Then again, maybe he’s actually smarter than we think, and he’s just extra cautious, working things out completely before exercising them and showing his talents. Yeah, right.

So, here’s a bit of what I remember using all of the queues included in the website snapshot I posted yesterday from 2003: We obviously owned our PT Cruizer back then. A purple one (Sandy’s). I keep thinking we had two of them, but I think that was only for our Neons – I had a black one and she had a blue one.

There was no Android OS, so we got our driving directions off of the web. I don’t recall if there was even a Google Maps back then, but I do vaguely remember getting directions from two different sites, one being much easier to use and providing better directions than the other. Sandy like Emeril of Food TV (now the Food Network), several of our friends had their own personal websites (Facebook didn’t exist yet), and our game consoles were the original Playstation, the Playstation 2, and the original X-Box.

We communicated a lot via Instant Messenger applications like AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), ICQ (I Seek You), MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. Eventually a few clever people decided to combine as many messenger services into one much-better service, and the likes of Odigo and Trillian became pretty popular. I remember using Trillian for quite some time, since I had friends and family on several of the different messengers–some on AIM, some on Yahoo, some on MSN… Trillian was of huge value for me.

ReadyHosting was my webhost back then, and I remember the main reason being that they were located in Kenosha. I remember taking a tour of their Kenosha facility back then and I was pretty disappointed. It was basically just a call center. The servers were located elsewhere, clearly not in Kenosha.

Most of my tech orders came from TigerDirect or CDW. Best Buy didn’t exist. I went to Radio Shack a lot though, as well as Chester’s Electronics, a local Kenosha-based electronics store that my dad and I loved to visit.

Search engines were considered “portals” and Google was either pretty small or non-existent, as you can see by my list of “Portals”. They included AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, MSN, Webcrawler, and Yahoo. Google is, however, listed under “Reference”, so they must have existed.

American TV and Circuit City existed back then along with Best Buy. Best Buy clearly outlived them, and Amazon will most likely outlive Best Buy the way things are looking.

Our favorite TV shows included The Practice, The Shield, Six Feet Under, Sopranos, Touched By An Angel, and The Screensasvers, a show on TechTV I loved. I was very sad to see that network die, I loved that show. It eventually came back, resurrected by Leo Laporte as “The New Screensavers”, which was also a great show I watch religiously, but that one was cancelled recently as well. Leo’s still around though, and still doing several tech shows from his TWiT studios and show named “TWiT” (This Week in Tech). He also does several other tech shows as well as a radio show.

There’s a lot more in that screenshot, and it feels really good to be able to recall so much just from a single screenshot… I guess a picture really is worth a thousand words. Or, in this case, about 542 words. Gawd, what a nerd.

I just cut the lawn for the first time this year. It felt pretty good. It’s actually been quite a while since I cut the lawn myself, now that we’ve given that job to Kevin as his way of paying room & board. But I forgot just how therapeutic it feels, especially with my new knee. It feels like pretty good therapy with the bumpy lawn’s twists and turns I have to take. Seems to give it a good workout and I even get a few thousand steps in.

It’s not like I had much of a choice though. Kevin is working today, and today is the only dry day for about the next 7 days. Yep, we’re going to get rain for 7 days in a row, if not longer, and I knew I couldn’t wait another week before cutting the grass for the first time. It would just be way too long and too difficult for Kevin to do at that point, so I had to get out there today and just git ‘er done.

I just finished the mowing and realized I left my keys in the house and the back door is locked so I’m locked out of the house. The puppies and I are sitting out in the backyard waiting for Mom to come home now. We don’t mind though, it could be much worse. The sun is out, everyone else is mowing their lawns too, and the puppy’s love running around in the backyard, especially with an audience looking on. They’re putting on quite the show, chasing each other around, chewing on leaves and sticks.

Last night was even more interesting in the backyard. I let the dogs out for business reasons and there were two bunnies in the yard. The dogs started chasing them in circles. One got away under the fence but the dogs were too close behind the second one so he just kept running in circles. After about four laps he was far enough ahead so he slipped under the fence and escaped. The puppies were pretty winded after that, but seemed like they really enjoyed it. I gave them each a treat, even though they failed to catch their prey.

In looking back at old copies of my website in the Wayback Machine I found that some very old posts didn’t make it to my new website. They aren’t older than 2001, so they were probably in an incompatible format (like GreyMatter, one of the formats my website was in for awhile) and never got copied over manually. As I find them, I’ve been adding them back into my current site and they’re placed right into the timeline very seamlessly based on their date, so they don’t appear as new posts. Some are just small bits of information, but they still provide information I find valuable, so I’m adding them no matter what their length. Here’s the list, including the link to each, if you’d like to flash back with me:

Making Modern Home Movies

Matt turns 17 and Harold †turns 75

Kevin’s 9th Birthday

Snow Storm Last Night

Police Scanner Technology

King Kong – The Movie, The Puzzle, and The Obsession

Photo Mosaics

Christmas Highlights

A Scary October!

At one point (04/20/2003) I even had a huge list of links on my frontpage, like the ultimate “portal page” containing all of my favorite sites. Those links were all converted to wayback links which don’t work, but perusing the page itself triggers plenty of flashbacks for me. Here’s a screenshot:

I started this blog in January, 2001, so I guess my blog is now an adult! At first, I thought that was really an accomplishment. Especially just to be able to stay in one place and intact and live for pretty much 99.9% of that time. But when I think about it a little more, I realize I’m already 56 years old, so only a small portion of that is on this blog. But I guess that just gives me more potential content in flashbacks and experience.

I’m trying to remember something, anything, about 2001. It looks like I was only posting about once every month back then, so there’s not much to work with here, but I might be able to find something just to reminisce.

Here’s what my website looked like back then (02/09/2001), courtesy of the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20010209025346/http://www.jimtrottier.com/

Google knows everything. I’ll go take a look and post more “flashbackie” stuff soon. I like looking back and reading those old posts. I find it amusing how I referred to myself in the third person as “Jim”. I guess I assumed it was a family blog, so I wanted to refer to everyone as if everything was written by the family. It just seems weird. But I don’t want to go in and correct it now, because that’s just how I wrote back then. I’ll correct obvious typos I find, but nothing that would actually alter the writing itself.

Last Sunday Kevin and I watched the big battle on Game of Thrones — the huge battle against the undead that they’ve been building to since season 1. We watched it on our new loveseat and our 50″ HDTV. The experience was pretty disappointing that night. I say “that night” because Game of Thrones totally redeemed itself last night when we re-watched it on a different HDTV — one that has 4K & HDR!

Our 50″ TV is 1080p with no HDR, but I thought it would be fine, it always was in the past. But this episode was just horrible on it. Literally every scene was extremely dim, almost unwatchable. We thought that might have been intentional, so we stuck it out, turning off all the lights in the room and desperately trying to see who was who and what was happening throughout the entire episode. Howard Stern even complained quite a bit on his show, saying how dark it was and that the director should have been fired for such a horrible episode no one could even see. I guess Howard doesn’t have HDR either, and if HE has the problem, I’m sure millions of others had the same experience.

So last night I decided to re-watch the episode on our TV that has 4K HDR. WOW. What a difference! I even found that turning off the HDR+, which I thought would be BETTER for this episode, had the exact opposite effect: It made the screen even brighter and clearer with the “Plus” turned off. So just standard HDR provided excellent lighting in pretty much every scene, even those that were obviously intended to be very dark. It seemed like a totally different episode. I actually saw the dead this time, all of the dragons and battle details, saw who died and who survived and understood much more of what happened. It was quite satisfying, and a great experience this time. Enough so that now I really want to replace our old TV, and won’t be satisfied until I do.

Let there be light… And HDR.

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.

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.

I’ve been trying to read more, trying hard to get back to the “old-fashioned” reading where you actually read words on a page. Well, not fully old-school, I’m using a Kindle Paperwhite, but it sure “seems” like I’m reading off of a printed page… it is nice. I threw a few hundred books from my collection onto my Kindle and I’m reading a bit whenever I get a chance. I might play some of them as audiobooks in the background while I have the printed book open on my Kindle just to try to transition a little more comfortably. Right now I’m finding it a little difficult to stay focused, usually having it very quiet when I’m reading. Or I might try putting some good music on in the background while I read. Like maybe a playlist based on the book I’m reading. Spotify users often create some really appropriate playlists, like the ones for Ready Player One.

Speaking of books, I just read this posting by Wil Wheaton. He’s trying to work on a book he’s writing, but he’s been suffering from depression for the past few months. He’s seeing a therapist, and it sounds like it’s helping, but this sure was enlightening. Everyone (or is it just me?) thinks celebrities must have these elaborate, perfect lives, where everything is catered to them and they are so happy and “living the life” all them time. Well, Wil is always very honest, as you’ll read, no different than anyone else, just trying to get by. I’m a huge fan of his, and hope everything works out ok. I’ll be one of the first ones to buy a copy of his new book, whenever it comes out.

Shadow actually fetched a ball and brought it back two times yesterday! This is a first for either of them. They love to chase balls when I throw them, but this is the first time he ever brought it back to me. He was praised and rewarded, of course. Progress! I also walked them around the perimeter of the backyard, one at a time, yesterday. They did ok. Shadow did a bit better than Tiger, sniffing things and looking around, like a puppy should. Tiger is still skittish, not knowing what to do or where to walk with leash on, still wrapping himself around my legs, looking up at me, trying to jump up my legs instead of walking. He’ll come along.

The puppies are doing great. They have totally consumed all of my spare time and attention. I only hope it’s enough. Yesterday I walked them both, one at a time, for a short distance. They’re both about the same, not sure when or where to walk yet, running around my feet and wrapping me up. I try to keep the leash short so this doesn’t happen, but if I go too short I feel like I’m going to choke them. Then I think about their poor tracheae, which are much more sensitive on chihuahuas. They’re getting a little better every day though, sometimes walking alongside me perfectly for short distances. This is when they get a treat. I walked one dog to the mailbox to get the mail and back, and the other I walked to the fire hydrant on the corner of our yard and back. So we didn’t leave our property, but it’s a lot better than where we were last week, when they couldn’t even walk down our hallway in the house. They would just freeze up (Shadow), lying down flat on his belly, legs spread out, clinging to the rug. Tiger would just sit down and refuse to walk, no matter how hard I tugged or begged him or held out a treat for him. He would even refuse to eat a treat when his leash was on him. So right now they’re still a little hesitant, but they don’t freeze up any more, and will take treats with the leash on. We’re making progress!

On more than one occasion we’ve caught them like this– both of them actually sitting inside their toy basket, on top of all of their toys. We’re not sure what the point is, but it’s funny. They know how to wrap themselves up into their blankets, so it’s not to keep warm.

They’re closer to being fully pad-trained now, but still have an accident once in awhile, which doesn’t really seem accidental. It’s never pee, as far as we can tell. They just occasionally poop in other places. We’re using a spray in those spots afterward, to both clean the spot and to deter them from going there, but then they just go in other places. We’ll get there soon, I’m sure. Just when it starts getting warm enough to start their outside potty training and we have to start all over again. Agh.

I also find it very difficult to write anything at home now… The puppies constantly try to get my attention, pulling at my socks and toes, running in and out of the room chasing each other–anything to get my attention. As I write this, Tiger is pulling my pant leg trying to get my attention. So I’m going to go, it’s time for puppy breakfast.

But first I have to mention this thing:

I don’t know what the heck it is, but I vaguely recalled it when we first got Shadow and Tiger, and after many views now it’s stuck in my head again. It’s a weird ad for the drink KickStart, which contains 3 ingredients. I get it–3 things blended together–but it’s just weird enough and disturbing enough to get stuck in your head. BE WARNED.