Really? It's August?!

Someone this week, very kindly, reminded me that I have a blog. (Thanks Mike.)  You'd think that with all that is going on, or not going on, that I would have found the time to sit down and put ink to paper, or slap a few keys around and hit 'PUBLISH'.


We all know darn well what's been going on for the past 5 months so we won't even go there. I will leave my comments on all aspects of the situation on the alpaca compost pile.

But needless to say, it has been a BUSY 5 months here at the Ranch.

The college man came home in March and took up residency in his room, and his downstairs office space.  (I hardly ever get to see him, even on Summer vacations, as he lives/attends class/works on campus.)

Doc was now working from home and took up full-time residency in HIS downstairs office space - yes, the one I remodeled in the late fall. (I hardly ever see him, even on Summer vacation, as he teaches Summer classes. (Sorry Summer School Kids.)

It has been nice to have them both at home for the occasional 'hey, this is heavy, someone haul this for me' to the 'field squirrels are out of control again, someone go set traps please', but while they are at "work" from early in the morning until at least 5pm or 7pm dinner, I considered them NOT home.  But just with them being IN the house the routine around here was turned on its head.  Just like it was for the majority of people.

Suddenly, the kitchen is open for lunch as well as dinner.  I couldn't get by with just me skipping lunch or having it out while running errands  anymore. And The Boy obviously wasn't eating at the 'all you can eat' dorm kitchen anymore.  DH wasn't packing lunches or going out with the office for lunch. Extra people in the house, meant extra laundry, food, cleaning, etc.  But it's all good. We get along well, and everyone had work/school/projects to keep them busy.)

(I'm also VERY glad that I finished the shared downstairs, office bathroom remodel in February, as are the two working on the lower level!)

Ranch life sputters forward. Nature cares not for the problem of man.

I actually DID have several posts ready in the wings, but technology happened.

Apparently when you work on a Chromebook, a very OLD Chromebook, it freezes up when you leave it open and it goes into sleep mode.  This causes you to have to force a hard shut down the Chromebook.  No big deal really.  That is, unless you've forgotten your password because you recently changed it, because your machine did this last week, forcing you to reset your password.  If you enter TOO many passwords, and use use phone as a back-up to reset your password, you are afforded the luxury of re-entering your Chromebook account and resetting the password. (:::Getting out pencil and paper and writing it down this time - hey, don't judge, being 50 is hard!)

Being able to now access my own Chromebook, I crawled into the files to work on another project involving a great deal of photo files.  GONE.  ALL GONE.  Apparently, unlike a real computer, I've been saving things to a temporary file. Who knew?!  Not me!

I was immediately dumbfounded, shocked, sad, and then angry.  I was then informed by both techies in the house, in their calm 'did you try turning it off and back on again tone', that I should have set the default to upload photos to the cloud.  NOW you tell me?! Seriously?!  :::Feeling my Norwegian Viking blood starting to boil:::

I'm not tech illiterate, but being an OCD I hold fast to the old ways and have a great deal of trouble learning, or caring to learn something new when it comes out.  Just ask the poor SPRINT customer service agent who got an earful after one phone update scrambled all the locations of my Apps on my home screens.  Learning new technology methods for me is like having to feed pureed peas to a baby for the first time.You know they're going to eventually go in where they need to, but there's going to be a lot of rejection, head shaking, crying, pleading, swearing, and possibly a new shirt involved before the peas go in and stay in.

So I'll start over and get some things on here to entertain you and let you know what's been going on here at the Ranch. 

While I'm canning today, and need to stay relatively close to listen to the 'old hiss and jiggle', I'll park myself on the deck, enjoy a decent day of weather, and schedule some posts to automatically update. So subscribe to follow or check back in!

Clouds doing what they're supposed to do, being pretty and precipitating, not hiding all my photo files!