I’ve been using Google’s Picasa, a free photo editing/organization software to handle my photos for my picture-a-day project, and I’m really happy with it. In particular it has lots of adjustments for color, tone, contrast, etc, just like you would expect – but it also has a button that says ‘I’m feeling lucky’, and when you hit that it throws what it’s got at it. And it’s usually pretty subtle, but so far it’s been pretty right on.

This is a picture I took the first day of the project, but I wasn’t using Picasa yet, and it was not nice enough to use.

I was looking at an article about Google Street View, and it hadn’t occurred to me to check and see if I could see my house there. I had checked a long time ago when they first started doing it, but they hadn’t got out this far yet. Well, they still haven’t got out to my house, but to my surprise, they had barely got to my town! In fact when you drag the street view icon over the map, you can see what they did get so far…

Yup, they drove down main street, came back down first and then got back onto main, and got the heck out of town! I was really shocked. I am used to looking at real estate listings all over the country and being able to snoop around the neighborhood where the house is. Not here. We’ve been snubbed by street view.

I’m guessing it will be a long tine before I can see my house on there!

Digging through family pictures Dave’s Dad gave us, I found this picture of us circa 1995-ish.

I can tell this picture was taken while we were visiting the folks in Portland (we lived in Yakima at the time), and we’re trapped into posing next to our car (my beloved stripey Miata) as we’re trying to make our escape – Dave’s Dad’s trademark shot “stand still and squint into the sun while I take a few pictures”! I have no idea what we were there for, but we’re certainly all dressed up. A wedding? A funeral? A job interview? No idea.

Dave says I have a mullet, but I told him it’s not a mullet when it’s on a girl, it’s just long hair!

So this week I was having a good time working on the van (the exterior door handle isn’t working on the back door, so the only way to get into the body of the van is to reach back and open the door from the inside) and I figured out what was broke and tried to kludge a fix but it failed so I called Ford and talked to a nice guy in parts and figured out what part I needed and how much it cost ($50!!!) and as I said goodbye and hung up the last thing I heard was ‘goodbye Sir’. Sir!?!?! Damn my husky voice! I hate when that happens. It doesn’t help my hobbies tend to be male dominated things like cars, so who would think a girl who knows what torix bits are would be calling up for a door release cable, right? Still. Ugh.

Then a couple days later I was at the store helping a regular customer and as he was leaving he says ‘I was in here the other day talking to your son’. My son?!?! You mean my husband, who’s six months OLDER THAN ME?!! OMG, How old do I look?! I said ‘My husband?’ and he immediately got very sheepish – ‘well, yeah, I guess I didn’t think about how old he was’. Again. Ugh.

I started out playing the FaceBook game FarmVille, and eventually enough of our 4H kids were playing FarmTown that they talked me into playing that one too. They are very similar, FT was the original, FV is the copy. At first I liked FV better, I thought the graphics were cleaner and you can harvest animals, so everything on the farm is productive. In fact there’s a little too much emphasis on production – mine has practically turned into a factory farm chasing the almighty dollar!

But I soon figured out the cool part about FT is the social interaction they have built into the game.

In FT they encourage you to hire other players to harvest your crops, and to plow your fields before planting. You are rewarded by getting more money for your crops, and a reduced fee for plowing – so it’s good for your pocketbook. Plus the workers get a chance to make a little extra farm money, and experience points. So folks go to the ‘marketplace’, which is a a chatroom, and hang out, hoping someone will come along and hire them. Sometimes it looks like a virtual unemployment line with everyone begging for work!

All those little unemployed avatars is so sad – sometimes it actually gets a bit depressing. After all, I play games to get a break from reality!

But then someone will come along and invite you to their farm to help bring in the harvest. That’s fun! You get to see their farm, and make a little money, and it does give you a little buzz of accomplishment 🙂 Sometimes someone will come to the marketplace and hire a whole bunch of people, and everyone scurries around on his farm trying to harvest as much as they can, like little army ants descending on a picnic!

This afternoon I went to the marketplace to hire someone to harvest my farm, and as soon as I showed up, someone hired ME to go harvest their farm. So I did, and made a bunch of coin I hadn’t been expecting – sweet! So I went back and hired someone to harvest my farm, and they were appreciative. It also bumped me up a level, I was able to expand my little farm, and I built a little forest retreat in one corner complete with a treehouse – double sweet!

So on FarmVille, once you’ve harvested what you can, there’s nothing to do until the next harvest, where in FarmTown, there’s always more to do. If your farm is taken care of, you can go work at someone else’s. So now I actually find myself dropping by FarmTown more often. It’s amazing what fun these little games can be, especially on a rainy day when you’ve got some time to kill and just want a bit of mindless entertainment!

In the courtyard in front of our house is my little japanese garden – at least that’s what I intended years ago when I started this project. But then the invasive bamboo took over and clogged the pond surface with constantly falling leaves, and plants in the pond reached their roots over and choked the pond pump into submission, and for the last year it has mostly been a challenge to keep it from becoming a mosquito heaven, and keeping the dogs from jumping into the stinky stagnant water. Yuk!

Today I made some good progress on fixing it up again. A few weeks ago I pulled the pump and cleaned it and got it running again. Then I cleaned out the pond as best as I could and refilled it with stones, burying the pump at the bottom and hiding the tubing under the rocks. The outlet is on the right, at the top of the stack of rocks, hidden by a piece of driftwood (all this stuff I stole out of my fishroom, since I don’t have any aquariums running anymore).

Once again our front walkway echos with the sound of water gently trickling over the rocks.

The pond looks so pretty reflecting the bamboo, at least it would if you didn’t know that BAMBOO IS EVIL!!! It must go! That’s my next project. I have about half of it cut down again, but I keep finding giant spiders living in it, so progress is slow. Everytime I find one I get the creepy-crawlies and have to go inside for a bit ! The problem with bamboo is that I’ve cut it to the ground three times, it just keeps coming back. I need to be more persistent than it is, and eventaully it will quit coming back.

Our living room TV is an older projection big-screen. There has been a cobweb inside it for quite some time, draped across the screen, driving me nuts. But we’ve been ignoring it. Today we were relaxing (it’s our day off), watching TV, when suddenly a big spider went skittering across the screen – yikes! Even from across the room it looked pretty big! Dave went to investigate and it was inside the TV! How annoying. He tapped on the screen and it didn’t react. Eventually it went off to the side, so we sat back down to continue watching the show, but the darned spider kept making more trips across the screen. About the third or fourth time I’d had enough!

We pulled the TV out and I got my tools and we pulled the back off of it. I was surprised that the whole upper part of the cabinet, even though it is very wide, consisted of nothing other than the screen, and a big angled mirror. The projection lenses were in the bottom, pointed up at the mirror. All the workings of the TV were in the bottom of the cabinet. I think the spider had been on the mirror, and that’s why it didn’t react when Dave tapped on the screen. We found the spider (an odd looking red spider with a black abdomen, and very stout) and put him outside. Then we vacuumed out the back of the screen and got rid of the cobweb, dusted the lenses and the mirror, and put it all back together.

Much better, no more cobwebs, and no more spider running across people’s faces!

I recently got peer-pressured into joining Facebook. In some ways, it’s like being in a big room, where everyone is shouting out what their thinking, and occasionally you respond and might even have a short conversation. But mostly it’s people blurting out what ever is on their mind, hoping to get something going, or just staying in touch. It’s interesting to suddenly be in touch with so many friends and acquaintances, and know what everyone is up to, even if you haven’t talked to them lately. Like our friend Gary in Yakima, who we usually just catch up with at Christmastime, now I know what he’s up to every day, and vice-versa.

Then my farmer/4H friends got on Facebook, and suddenly everyone was playing Farmtown or Farmville. I finally gave in on that too. I signed up for Farmville, and actually, it’s kind of cute. That’s a picture of my little farm. I wish my real-life farm was so easy! However I’ve never had coins pop up out of the ground while plowing in real life. And when I give my friends a real gift, I have to pay for it. Also, although I don’t have a fence up, my livestock have not raided the gardens or peeled all the bark off the trees – they’ll do that in real life, you know!

It’s fun to see what different people’s farms look like, one of my friends has nothing but animals on his farm, and he has them packed in like sardines, so there is a whole battalion of chickens, in perfect rows, pecking the ground in unison, with one confused duck in the middle of it all 🙂 Very cute! Meanwhile, in real life, I spent this morning trying to figure out how one of my young hens kept escaping the coop before she got chased by the dogs!

Of course, nothing is free. There are ads down the side of the pages, and you are encouraged to join your other friends up in order to expand your farm. Also you can buy credits for your farm with real $$, or you can click on ads and sign up for stuff and get paid farm dollars. That’s one thing if you wanted to do Netflix anyway, but tying it into a game like that kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But you don’t have to do any of those things, you can just play and ignore all that other stuff.

Still, it’s interesting to see how this company has set up a game which you must return to every day, or several times a day depending on what you plant, else your crops will wither, and so they guarantee return visits for their advertisers, and offer you credits to get you to visit advertisers, plus they’ll just outright take your cash in return for credits if you want. Multiple revenue streams, and guaranteed return visits, and in return the users get to play a cute, addictive little game. It’s quite a setup they have going.

BTW, I should mention that since I use Firefox with AdBlocker, I didn’t even realize there was advertising on Facebook until Dave pointed it out on his computer (which uses IE). AdBlocker is sweet!

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