Reflections

Wine-colored decoration

Another from the museum. Things are not slowing down, yet. Not sure if they will before Christmas. I am trying to carve out some "me" time. I did update a few belated photo projects on my family photo album page.

I anticipate a lot more decorations to see this year because of this beautiful weather we are having. I was able to start on my patio. I cannot lay my hands on some of my blue lights so the scene is a little bare right now. I plan to add to it as the weeks go by. Not sure if I can spend much in that area to help fill it out, but I will keep a close eye on store sales.

Thank-you, thank-you very much

Elvis atop a tree

I finally get some time to sit and reflect this morning. I am not rushing off somewhere.

I had an unusually raucous day with my family Thursday. On the big feast day usually we sit around stuffing ourselves and lay around afterward talking. Somebody brought the game "Catch Phrase".

We played in teams. When a team won, they remained seated and took on the next set of challengers. We roared. My head about blew off my shoulders from laughing so hard. I finally lost and was able to get some aspirin in me. The folks around us had just as much fun watching us as we did playing. The word that stumped me pretty good was permafrost.

I fixed a turkey and ham on Friday for the crew at my house. My sister and nephew went to one of the stores on Friday morning. I don't think anyone in my family indulges in that mad rush of shoppers on Black Friday. I prefer to celebrate the "Buy Nothing Day." They said it was exciting and fun but would probably not do it again. By the sound of it, I am thinking that people who want the sales also like the "party" atmosphere of the event. Don't knock it until you try it, right?

It has been rather busy at the Peruby household and I am off and running today. My sister is moving into a new house and a bunch of us are meeting there to help clean. I will take the camera today. I carried it to the big feast day, but didn't even get it out of the bag. I was trying to hog one of the two little ones all day.

It was also kind of sad because the younger generation are struggling. Two couples did not participate in the name exchange this year because of financial problems. One had their car engine blow up and it was costly to get repaired. They are also having pet problems that are costing a lot in medical bills. They seemed a little down in the dumps. I had my hard times in my mid to late twenties while living away from the family in another state. The ones that are having it rough right now, graduated from college a couple of years ago and are trying to start a life with their husband/wife, keeping up with expenses of a home, paying off college loans, and trying to make it in this cut-throat job market today.

Living in America should not be this hard.

This year I am thankful for a wonderful family. I am so very blessed. Thank-you, thank-you very much.

Red, silver and green

Inside a decorated tree

One of my favorite things about the Christmas season is the glittery, sparkly decorations. I used to sit and stare at our tree and squint my eyes until all the pretty lights blurred before me. I get mesmerized. Things don't look so drab when it is all spruced up in silvery colors.

My daughter got a cortisone shot in her back this evening. A keloid formed on one of her scars. Afterwards, we went to a big mall. It was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. For an early Christmas gift I purchased my daughter the white Rylie parka at Abercrombie. I went to the grocery store earlier in the afternoon. And I still have a happy spirit. My feet are killing me, but my mood is okay.

The ivory

Ivory train

Mr. Warther carved wood, ebony and ivory. They are well known for their knives. I have a couple. They are nice, but I prefer serrated knives, which they don't carry.

It is written that Mr. Warther only purchased ivory when the product was taken from elephants that had already died. Before the poaching began.

A hint of blue

Capri blue

At an antique store I found some Capri blue glasses that remind me of the hue that the glass in the photo above is reflecting. If you Google Capri glass, you get some photos with the same tint.

My IP has been purchased by another cable company and I was thinking that I had better download my entire Photo web page for backup purposes. 420MB I have out there. Ouch.

The Chef

A Christmas tree Chef

I thought this fellow was kind of cute. He mostly covered a tree that was decorated in tiny kitchen utensils. The huge baguette for his necktie just really evens him out. He was one of the trees at the museum.

Where did the week-end go? I have tried, but I cannot recall anything I did on Saturday morning. Before lunch and the museum. What? I can recall Friday night, Saturday afternoon and evening and today I was away visiting and setting up a computer for a friend. But Saturday morning is a big blank. I think I cleaned.

It (the week-end) is gone and it is back to work on Monday. Friday was so nice because we had a huge meal where everyone brought a covered dish. I did deviled eggs and cheese ball. This year there were more desserts than dinner food. And, my God what sweet dishes they were! There were pumpkin rolls, pumpkin/cool whip dip, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin trifle, pecan pie, pumpkin coffee cake, pumpkin pie, apple pie, and more.

For Thursday I am making a vegetable/dip tray. I am not sure what else. I will make my big meal for here at the house on Friday or Saturday, depending on when the rest of the crew will be here to eat it. It is too sad to go to a family member's house for Thanksgiving dinner and return to your own home where there are no leftovers. Too sad!

Red, gold and green

A decorated tree from the museum

My daughter and I went to Warther's museum today to see the pre-decorated trees. They were stunning. I think every one of them were SOLD. Not that I intended to purchase any. Nope. Out of my price range. I just like to look.

Evil

Photo Friday Challenge: Evil

A morning in June

The sun peeking through the pine

This photo of the morning sun was taken last June. It is the east side neighbors' yard. One is a big pine tree. My dog always is interested in what is underneath that pine. It has low branches and hides little critters well, I suppose.

We are getting a cold, steely rain here today. It makes it so that you don't want to do much of anything but cozy up under a warm blanket and drink some nice hot cocoa/hot chocolate/tea. I usually don't watch television at night unless it is something really light such as Seinfeld. Which is what I caught this evening and then the channel went straight into a show called Bones. I have never even heard of it before. I watched the hour episode, caught up in it. I hear the folks at work talk about certain shows such as Grey's Anatomy. I am such a dolt, I thought that Grey was a man. As I look at IMDB, I can see that it is a female and her name is Dr. Grey. Okay.

Speaking of co-workers, I was subject to an hour (no less) of church conversation. Between two Catholics and how their religion is so much more beautiful than others. I did not say one word. I normally don't tread into such dangerous waters. One co-worker has been trying a (non-Catholic) church that her Aunt was preaching at recently. She called them "Holy Rollers". Jumping up and singing and speaking in tongues and such. I've been known to speak in tongues. Yeah. When I am so mad, the words don't come out right - it resembles something like gibberish. Nobody can understand what I say. I did overhear (from yesterday's religion topic) about having a translator for somebody speaking in tongues. They have a translator? What is the qualification for that?

One of the cast members in Bones was lightly teasing another about his religion in the hour long show. I gather that she was an atheist and he was Catholic. She wanted to attend his church so that she could have a better perspective for her writing, I am thinking. I guess it was just a religious topic kind of day for me.

I went to Sunday school when I was young. My sister's took me along. (CUMC). When I was a young teen I joined the church choir. When I was fifteen I began working in a restaurant/bar. My Saturday nights consisted of 4:30 - 1:30 a.m. And, my Sundays began at 10:00 a.m. at the same kitchen. That kind of knocked the church going out of me. What do I recall about Sunday school? Memorizing Bible books so that I could win a prize of some sort. It must have been in my short term memory, because I can't get past the second book now. I can remember the books, just not in order any more.

Personally - I found that the people in the bar were more "real" to me than those in the church.

Glory Lory

Lory State Park

This photo is from my nephew's collection when he went out to Colorado to visit my other nephew last month. The one in Colorado lives near Lory State Park. They just got dumped with a bunch of snow and experienced really strong winds.

My nephew and his girlfriend are both in the Park Conservation area of work. I hope the extreme weather does not deter them. She is from Texas. Does she even know how to drive in snow? In the pictures from October she looked as if she were freezing. Here in Ohio, my nephew has had his fair share, but I don't know about the mountains there. We have hills, not mountains. I hope all is well with them. I just spoke with my sister this morning. I don't think she was aware of the recent storm out there when I called her.

That sure is some pretty territory out there.

Midnight blue

Midnight blue sky

In a typical box of Crayola crayons was the midnight blue. My favorite. Or was it Pine green? The midnight blue used to be titled "Prussian" blue. Teachers asked that it be changed in 1958. Where do I learn this stuff? Wikipedia.com!

I think there is a mistake on the page. I could have sworn "cornflower" was a pretty pale blue. When I Google the image "cornflower" I get blue photos. Some purple and one goofy looking guy, but not the dull brown they are showing on the Wikipedia page. I think they just made a mistake and copied the "Copper" color above it.

(Update: Reading on down the page, I see where the correct cornflower is displayed # 31)

Aw, I loved Mulberry. They retired it and renamed it to Mango Tango. Blech.

I love color(s). Which color listed below was not included in the original 8?

black
blue
white
yellow
red
green
orange
violet
brown

Strange beaks

LOL! Beak abuse

I "fisheyed" their beaks to give them this daffy duck look. My bad.

I officially began my Christmas shopping outside of the home yesterday. (I've done some on-line shopping from home). Oh.my.God! Maybe it was the Veterans day sales. Maybe it was the wet, rainy weather. We started early so it wasn't all that crowded to begin with. We went to an Outlet store. I have not been to this Outlet store. I am not a willing shopper so the only Outlet stores I ever go to are when I am on vacation.

I didn't know what to expect. The next time I go I am loading a plastic bag with every sharp object I can find in my house and this can be a warning for all the pushy, rude shoppers out there who bump in to me, drag my purse halfway through the aisle with them and lean up on me to get through a crowded area. I WILL draw first blood.

I have a severe case of aversion to strangers touching me. Regardless, I did a fair amount of shopping. Repeat to yourself. "It is okay to purchase items for yourself even though you are supposed to be shopping for others. It is okay to purchase items for yourself even though you are supposed to be shopping for others. It is okay....it is okay....it is okay... YAY! It IS okay."

Gross!

Found in my bathroom

When my daughter had one of her very good friends over, I found this in my bathroom. It wasn't her friends' mold. It was the Uncle of her friend. Why would anybody...? Oh never mind.

It is my Photo Friday Challenge for: Gross.

Light

Photo Friday Challenge: Light (late. this is from the 3rd!)

Access

My glasses and pen on my notes

So while my daughter takes her driver's ed in the building that I work in, I just stay upstairs in my office for an extra three hours until she is done. I may run out to get a bite to eat or let the dog out, but I am pretty content to sit quietly in my office and document, document, document.

There are some individuals in this world who have nothing better to do but to think of ways to muck things up. They devise these little programs (worms) that will bring an entire network to it's knees. It isn't a virus. A lot of end users just clump anything that corrupts a computer or a network as a virus.

One version is a DoS. Denial of Service attack. If this little program gets the IP address of a server in a network, it can really cause some havoc. When a machine sends a request to a server, the server MUST answer. That is it's job. Like a doorman. Somebody knocks on the door and the doorman answers. The little devil knocker has run and is hiding behind a bush. The doorman stands with the door open for a few seconds, looking from left to right, then shrugs and closes the door. Before the doorman can turn around to go back to his "other" work, there is another knock on the door. The doorman answers the door. Again, nobody is there. The doorman looks around again and then closes the door.

Now, multiply that to a billion or so and you get the idea that the server is now "unable to serve". A Denial of Service attack has been performed on the network and legitimate end users do not get their door knock answered because the doorman is too busy attempting to serve the knocker who keeps running away and hiding behind the bush. Unlike a human brain, the server cannot "learn" to ignore the knock, but must try to respond each and every time. Sick, I tell you. Just sick.

In business, this can be nipped in the bud pretty quickly. When business is not getting done, you can bet that some money is going to be spent to resolve this problem as quickly as possible. But, in a school, the problem may go on for weeks.

A teacher instructs the lab to go to a science page. They type in the url and click. The browser just sits and spins. Going nowhere. The resources of the network are depleted because deep inside the network the attack is at full throttle. The kids begin to snicker. One throws a balled up piece of paper at their friend. The teacher is side tracked by another student. Meanwhile, the browsers for this class go nowhere. The teacher sighs and tells the class that she (or he) must go and find the technology person to see what is going on and they leave the classroom.

A bored students recalls the funny video he saw on youtube the night before. He tells a friend and they decide to see if the browser will get them out to youtube. If not, Google will show them a hundred other sites that may have that very funny video. It could be on somebody's blog. The filter has a tough time stopping this type of errant behavior. A pause in the network attack allows the student to begin the video. They laugh and a couple of other students try and see if their machine will pull up the video. Pretty soon the school has a dozen or so machines attempting to play the very funny dirtbike video. Meanwhile the attack begins again, this time from another machine.

I had a strange thought pop into my head today. I do get a lot of "sappy" e-mails. You know they type. "You are such a true friend, here is a bouquet of flowers just for you..." on and on. I rarely (if ever) forward these. I do a lot of reading about how the Internet works behind the scenes and I understand how bogged down a network can get. As I painfully wrote above. It occurred to me that someday the Internet could get so bogged down with useless junk (it may already be there) that nobody is going to move. It will be like this precious commodity. I can hear end users crying "If only we knew we were wasting the precious databases of the world by plugging up the networks with all that garbage!"

Yeah, I need to get outside and walk more.

Little white duck

Sitting in the water

This sitting duck is from my photo shoot yesterday at the lake in our town park. I wanted to add the blue tint to this photo so much, but I didn't. It was a murky, gray day and the water was murky. Except for the sky, which was a strange bit of gray, blue and white.

I didn't have much time to take photos today. I was stuck behind my laptop most of the day chasing an IP storm on a school's network. They have an anti-virus program, but some end users were not updating their Windows with the latest updates. I think I may have stopped it at the router anyway. I hope so. I will be able to tell tomorrow when everybody turns their machines back on.

My daughter began her two week driver's training class this evening. Next she will get her driving permit. For six months I will have a personal chauffeur. As I did when my niece was learning to drive. You can get quite spoiled by it.

I was also able to inform a school network technician about a registered sex offender that he was letting have access to his school's network. He had no idea. The guy is a salesman for a local computer company and this school had his establishment do some work for them. No more. I pulled up the information on the offender off of the sheriff's page and printed it out.

Since my daughter is taking her driver's training in the building where my office is, I am staying over in the evening until she is finished. Once I pulled up that offender, I went on and began looking at all the ones that live in my town. It is remarkable how many are there living amongst us. There are women, too. I knew nothing of this type of behavior when I was growing up. It just boggles the mind.

The sky tonight

Our Park lake

The sky was rather interesting this evening from the park. I went there to photograph the ducks and wild geese. Even though we have a lot of mallards, the color just wasn't there. It was late in the day and I didn't have enough sunlight to bring out the emerald green of their heads. So, I aimed for the sky.

The tennis and basketball courts were empty. There were a group of men who came to play Bocce right before I left. I watched a couple of small family groups feeding the ducks and that was about all for this November Sunday.

It was a weekend for everybody to get out their rakes and leaf blowers. Most of the time I rake, but this year I plugged in the noisy, heavy leaf blower. I am getting the hang of it. At least I didn't blow them all in the neighbor's yard. They are at the edge of the street waiting for the city to vacuum them up in their big, dirty, white street machine.

I've been busy reading and researching the levies, issues and candidates for Tuesday. I think I can see why my Mom never voted. If you are going to vote, you have to be serious. Very serious. It isn't something to be taken lightly. You have to work at it.

Going back a bit

Halloween 2004

My daughter (in the middle) with two of her friends around Halloween 2004. They were dressing up to go to a dance. Uh...the one on the far left is indeed a boy. My daughter was dating him at the time. Yikes.

I am not sure I recall what she dressed as last year (if anything), but this year was the vampire chick or something similar. Mostly I think they see how much black make-up they can put on and still look halfway human.

Things were messy back then, but mostly I could handle it. As it stands now, they are out there loose and I don't get to hear or know half of what goes on. Probably for the best.

The boy is in another school district altogether and the girl on the far right is still in the picture, just not running in the same circles any more.

Rose hitch hiker

A little hitch hiker on the rose

I didn't see the fly until after I downloaded the pictures onto my P.C. and began cropping them. He is hanging there upside down. Probably enjoying his last hours with the sweet scent and refreshing water droplets.

I returned to my place of work today to find the offices closed because the electricity was off. I had been out of town attending a regional meeting. Yesterday the gas, today the electricity. What next, the water? Perish the thought! I went to the bathroom in the pitch black when I returned to the office. Hey, what else can you do at a meeting besides drink coffee?

I went home and worked from there. I can do about 90% of my office work at home anyway. Maybe even 100% if they let me use my work cell phone all of the time instead of my desk phone.

Didn't hear anything negative at the meeting. That is good. The tech guy hosting the meeting had to show us a slide presentation of his server farm that his career center purchased for $62k. In the business world, that wouldn't seem like a lot, but to the schools it was like dangling a piece of hot fudge cake in front of their noses. The public school systems can't afford that kind of expense. What was the guy doing? Bragging? Showing off? What a prince. (you know I wanted to type the other word here!)

Late bloomer

A November rose

About an hour after we started work, the superintendent came on the intercom and told us they could smell gas in the building and for us to go outside. I was just removing my battery from the wall socket and putting it into my camera bag. I grabbed my purse and the camera and out to the back alley I went. He didn't have to tell me twice.

I walked a ways before I found some life left in the season. I found a rose bush with about five blooms on it and they had dew on them and the sun was kissing them. I snapped away. I kept walking around the house to see if there was anyone at the door so I could ask permission. The bush was about two feet off of the alley, but I still didn't want to be rude. Nobody came to the door, so I left.

The smell was sewage backed up. This has been a recent problem in this section of town. I lived directly across the street from 1996 to 2001 and I never smelled any sewage. Of course once I moved to the other side of town, work decides to buy the building that is located about 400 feet from where I used to live. Of course!