That could have been a problem

I really want to get a new GoPro Camera.

I’ve been meaning to do it but keep putting it off due to the expense and / or waiting for the new model.

I’d like to get one for a couple of reasons. They’re not bad dive cameras with the right water tight enclosures. They’re good hiking and trail riding cameras and their still photos are really good too.

Ds 070 02_1 3204930131.All of this came to light again this morning as Jesse and I were on our walk. 

We often see wildlife on our walks and I’m never able to get him under control and be able to get my phone out and deployed one handed in time. I’d really prefer to have something simple that I could mount my iPhone to and be able to use the remote shutter function in my watch to control the phone.

That would be a simple single point solution for the hiking. The GoPro would then be mostly about diving.

Ef454549 3b78 470d b7cd b303863b0f5c.67efa08eb720b9154f279d0541857b17.I own an older GoPro but the batteries are tired and honestly, it’s always been a pain in the but to get photos or videos off the damn thing. I don’t like having to pay a subscription so that my photos and videos can be uploaded to the GoPro cloud, then back down to my computer. Or that directly connecting the USB C connector from the GoPro to my computer won’t allow direct transfer to my computer where I”m going to be editing the movie in the first place, but it works for recharging the camera. The only way to do anything directly is to remove the super small SD card from the camera, then download the files from that (using an adapter for the SD card and a dongle for the SD card adapter to the USB C port) to my computer.)

It literally was such a frustrating pain in the ass I stopped using the GoPro and canceled the $59 a year subscription. 

I suppose, I’m a minimalist. I have device A and device B in my hands (or on a table) both have comparable connections based on an IEEE standard so Silly me, I expect the connection to work.

I suppose that’s another reason that I’ve been holding off on buying another GoPro. I want to be able to return the fucker if contrary to their specifications getting data off the camera is a cluster fuck.

Anyhoo. I suppose I’m still a bit frustrated by GoPro’s design failures in the past.

All of this was underscored on my walk with Jesse today.

Jesse suddenly stopped, but was at full attention. He was looking at something very intently and at first I couldn’t see what had his attention. Often he’ll do this if there’s a very large lizard. Then I noticed the short dry grass moving in an unnatural way. Meaning, the breeze was going one way, and the grass was moving against the breeze. 

Then I saw a dark line, and realized it was a snake of some kind.

Jesse was curious, but cautious. He was, however moving slowly toward the snake as it was moving toward the path we were walking on. The snake had a dark grayish color, it wasn’t until it got closer that I caught a bit of a greenish undertone and saw the tail.

The 3 little knobs told the tale. I was looking at a young rattlesnake, based on the colors it was probably a Mojave green rattlesnake.

The photo shown is a professional shot. Looking at it, I think the snake we encountered might also have been nearing time to shed its skin. The nice triangular markings in this photo were not as obvious. I don’t know off hand if juveniles have different colors/patterns. 

Jesse remained fairly calm as we watched the snake pass us. But it was one of those times when I wished again for a POV camera strapped to my head, chest, or perched on my shoulder.

This snake paid us absolutely no mind at all. It passed behind us moving straight across the path we’d been walking on.

In other words, all was naturally harmonious. The snake couldn’t have eaten us and we had no reason to bother it. So three apex predators in our respective niches passed each other with due respect and nobody got hurt.

I’d have liked to have pictures and video of it because I like nature.  Jesse & I were in fact walking through the snakes and other predators territory. I like the mutual, “We’re going to leave you alone if you leave us alone,” vibe when we’re hiking.

Some of the deer we run across this time of year have figured out, try as he might, Jesse isn’t going to chase them. They often watch us closely, but don’t necessarily bolt unless we’re too close. They’re beautiful and I’d like to get photos of them. However, me raising anything shiny and metallic towards them will cause panic and in an instant they’re gone.

Some kind of mounting apparatus would be helpful to capture them in their natural habitat too.

Predator desktop background_1239232_286.The newer GoPro cameras appear to have corrected their initial design flaws regarding data transfer. I’m not entirely convinced but would be willing to try. 9/4 GoPro is releasing 2 new cameras so I’ll take a look and see if there’s anything that is worthwhile.

Maybe I’ll just keep shopping for something that works with my iPhone.

I’d really like a rig like Predator. Head tracking would be a lot of fun even if it was only a camera and not an energy weapon.

This is kind of funny and sad at the same time.

Remove all toxic people positive.As I’ve mentioned, over time my neighborhood has become “interesting”.

When Jerry & I moved here we were the most “Interesting” feature.

My little mountain town was mostly Mormon, very conservative, and typically had less than 2000 full time people. 

We had a police substation, and the hardware store sold ammunition. There were antique stores, several good places to eat, and I think one bar, maybe two, While the Mormons didn’t drink, the Methodists, Catholics, and tourists did.

This was a sleepy little town most of the year unless there was snow. Then the place was hopping.

Jerry had lived for several years in a little one bedroom cabin closer to the main road when we met. When we decided to join our lives, we moved into the area that I now live.

Over time, people have come & gone. The town isn’t as conservative as it once was, the police substation is gone. We have more bars, more empty storefronts, the hardware store doesn’t sell ammunition anymore and where the town was once decidedly Republican, it’s now liberal Democrat.

In a way, this little town is a microcosm depicting the decline of small town America.

As the 2024 election season rolls around, there have already been incidents of vandalization regarding campaign signs. 

In 2020 Trump supporters couldn’t keep a Trump sign on their lawns. That was when I first noticed this other factor I’d never noticed before. That there were a bunch of busybodies who knew what was best of everyone. 

Oh, there have always been those kinds of people, but suddenly there were a lot more of them and as their numbers grew, so did their militant behavior. 

Jerry in his way, was able to ignore them. He deserves his wings in heaven. He would calm me when I encountered these people which happened more frequently as time progressed.

I think he understood the danger, and what was triggering me, but he chose to see the best in even the nastiest people. Someone had to really push, to ruffle Jerry’s feathers. I, on the other hand, often am the proverbial “Canary in a coal mine” 

In our end of town, the police, firemen, and military folks that lived in the houses around us, were replaced by liberal and frankly impractical folks.

As time went on, there were several years where Jerry & I in our late 50’s were the only people clearing the snow from our road.

Where once all the neighbors on our street would help each other, now it was just He & I. The other residents benefitted from our work but never thought to say “Thank You”, much less get off their asses to help.

Fortunately, we got another neighbor who understood that two old folks shoveling snow alone was inappropriate & he started helping. Then a dazzling urbanite who’d moved into a house at the end of the street sold and the new buyers were a young couple.

The man works for California Department of Forestry in their fire division. She works for the county in some capacity and they too are out with snow throwers and shovels in the Winter.

Since Jerry has gone, they’ve told me to not work so hard, so I take more frequent breaks. I have to race the young man to clear my driveway. The sneak will wait till I go inside for a cup of coffee or to use the restroom, and “Boom” he’s out there with his snow thrower clearing my driveway and just grinning. He and his wife are lovely wonderful people and I genuinely like them.

All of this is to say that not everything is bad, but everything has changed. That’s the nature of life and living.

About 1/2 block from my house the neighborhood changes dramatically. For years, there’s been a crazy lady and by crazy, I mean full goose bozo! If she’s off her meds you never know what you’re going to get and sometimes, her mood and behavior are like changing TV channels.

She lives with a boytoy who’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I honestly don’t know if they’re still screwing at this point. There’ve been a couple women that he appears to be dating. He’s not much to look at, or have a conversation with. I assume he has other “attributes”.

He’s also not got too many teeth in his head and reminds me of some of the folks of my youth who came from the deep hollers in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. 

In Virginia, West Virginia, or Kentucky, he’d be right at home and perhaps prize marrying material, or maybe just the Daddy-Uncle-Cousin of half the kids in the holler.

There’s another guy, who moved into a house formerly occupied by a cop and his lovely wife, then a guy who ended up going to work for one of the government agencies with 3 letters, a big budget, and a lot of “off the books projects”. At least that what he told me. Both of these households were neat folks and good neighbors.

The current occupant is someone that I’ve always been circumspect about. Jerry, on the other hand, liked everyone and it was through him that I ended up dealing with Pete. This guy has always been a little off and time hasn’t helped.

He’s also a major pot head which I now think has longer lasting and more serious effects than previously advertised. Just as Alcohol on a daily basis can have more far reaching effects than having a drink or two, once every couple of months.

This is the guy whose cat and home I got stuck looking after while he was recovering from his stroke. This is the guy whose home irritated my sinuses so bad that I literally couldn’t stay inside the place for too long without being dizzy.

This is the guy who I was ferrying to his doctors appointments for a while before Jerry died and then after Jerry died I still got to take him to the medical facility. Even though that was literally the last place on earth I wanted to be. I did it for Jerry’s sake.

I knew if I didn’t do it while Jerry was alive, Jerry would rework his schedule and take on this task too, out of the goodness of his heart. After Jerry died, There were commitments but after that… I stepped away.

Pete is not my kind of people. He never has been and I’ve thought on more than one occasion that he was a toxic individual.

Now that Jerry is gone, there’s not much reason for me to keep this toxic person in my life and his behavior over the past 2 months has been ample reason for me to dump him.

He’s a very unhappy man. He’s a control freak, and the world itself doesn’t spin according to his whim. (I thought I was bad…)

People can’t have their exterior lights on in the early evening because it disturbs his sleep. Dogs can’t bark, people can’t use their gas leaf blowers. Automated phone systems don’t work for him, so he screams almost daily about the machines not working. (Okay, I’ll give him that one!) Literally nothing makes this guy happy except fussing and cussing about what’s wrong with everything.

I don’t want to be this guy! I choose another path, a path of lightness and happiness.

This guy is the ultimate Karen!!!

a.k.a. The ultimate Democrat. I know that sounds bad, and looks like I did this long lead in just to bash Democrats but I really didn’t. 

Bear with me.

This person actually believes that dogs barking a) can be silenced by him shouting obscenities at the top of his lungs, from the safety of his living room at the neighborhood. b) the dogs barking are some kind of sadistic plot directed against him. c) the dogs owners will hear him screaming about their dogs barking while they are at work. d) that all dogs barking within 1/2 mile are the same dog.

Any intrusion of reality into this delusion results in threats of calling animal control and the dog owners being called whores, fascists, & motherfuckers. 

He refuses to understand how dogs react to a voice they’ve never heard, right?

They stop barking, listen, decide you’re not their person, or a person they know, and start barking again. The cycle is repetitive, and Pete feeds it! By the time 5 or 6 hours of this has passed, well, it’s pretty exhausting. The escalating screaming, threats, and promises of violence are very disruptive and disturbing. Can you see where this is going?

It’s an endless insane cycle, human versus K9 and the whole dang neighborhood has to put up with it. In this guy’s reality, he’s making progress.

He texted me asking if He was the only person this bothered. I told him, “Yes”.

I explained that the most annoying dogs in the neighborhood were the chihuahuas right next door to him. I also expressed my concern that his swearing coupled with “bad dog” was terrifying Jesse and that it needed to stop.

He replied that he wasn’t yelling at Jesse. I told him, “Jesse doesn’t know that! All Jesse understands is that a human is cussing and saying bad dog.”

I explained further that I didn’t appreciate finding Jesse curled up at the furthest place away from the source of the screaming shaking like a leaf.

Not that any of that caused a change in the behavior.

The conversation devolved when Pete asked, “How we’d come to have this happening in the neighborhood.”

My response was a waste of time and electrons.

I tried to explain using examples that we’d been too lenient and in our kindness we’d communicated that we were easy “marks”.

8 things toxic people do.That led to certain elements in the neighborhood continuing to expand their abuses. Trash, vehicles, trailer, stacks of junk, 6 or 8 yapping chihuahuas who start barking as a leaf being blown across the yard.

However, Pete chose to fixate on the specifics of the examples I used.  Then he started to tear apart the example I used, instead of picking up on the overarching point I was trying to make.

That ended when I realized there was no reasoning with him. That he was willfully missing the point, and when he said that Jerry had not seen what Jerry had in fact seen and that I too had seen, regarding a video recording showing a neighbor taking things without asking from another neighbor’s home.

Then after Pete said Jerry was essentially an idiot, and that the neighbors who had been stolen from were pigs… For calling the police? For demanding that the thief neighbor remove a dead vehicle from their property? 

So they were the bad guys… WTF?

He then told me that I wasn’t allowed to speak “Incorrect” things about what’s going on in the neighborhood and then leave the conversation.

Excuse me? Supposedly I was obliged to be corrected by his (questionable) wisdom. I’m not allowed to choose what is of value to me? Which conversations I choose to engage in? Uhhh nope!

I don’t exist for you to use me as a punching bag!

Then I realized a few things. 

1) It was pointless to continue the conversation

2) This was indicative of previous conversations over the past 8 – 10 months. 

3) Every conversation devolved into a verbal knife fight and none of those conversations were worth the effort.

I was reading his demanding message on my phone and thought, “You know what? I’m just sociopathic enough that it’s really for me to sever connections. Family, friends, enemies, you name it. “

My response was, “Oh… I’m not interested in this conversation anymore. So please just stop.”

He chose that moment to try to bully me more. Reiterating that I couldn’t just say something he disagreed with and then leave the conversation. 

I said, “Really? Watch this!” I added his number to my “BLOCKED” list.

The moral of the story is this.

Toxic people take more energy to deal with than nontoxic people. Toxic folks, don’t deserve the ability to force you to live their misery with them. They’ve created their misery and they, as divas, try to suck others into that misery for the sake of getting attention.

Make your life better by Jettisoning the chronically toxic, people who are using you because they cause you harm. None of us have any obligation to coddle these folks.

Spend that energy on good folks who are kind and lovable. The return is that you’ll be treated kindly and loved in return. 

You’ll be happier.

From this blog It doesn’t look like it…

QuillDarkFeatherInkSet…But I do set aside time to write every day.

Over the past few months, writing has been increasingly difficult and I’m at a loss as to why that might be.

There have been more days than I care to admit where I’ve sat down with the computer, or iPad fully intending to write something magnificent. Okay, maybe not magnificent, how about just writing anything at all?

There have been days when I’d have been happy with the letter “A” on a page. Even that has been difficult and I have no clue what’s disrupting my thought processes.

Maybe it’s time to get some of that over the counter memory drug that’s always on the TV. Much as I don’t want to admit it, I’m in the requisite age group.

YoungFrankenstein abnormal.jpegPerhaps, the problem is the same one encountered in Young Frankenstein and I need a brain replacement. Or I’ve, unbeknownst to me, had a replacement and that isn’t going well.

It tends to frustrate me. No, it pisses me off!

For whatever it’s worth, I’m trying really hard not to end up a bitter, mean, old man.

One of those in the neighborhood is quite enough, and that guy is really starting to damage my calm!

He’s taken to screaming and hollering about literally any noise in the neighborhood. My next door neighbors have gas powered leaf blowers that each uses maybe once a month and even then only for 15 to 20 minutes maximum. We’re always under water restrictions so instead of washing down the decks or their driveways, they’ll use the blowers, especially if they’ve been trimming plants or what have you. 

The neighbor about a 1/2 block away but on line of sight with my street loses his mind and starts swearing and screaming “it’s not a parking lot out here!!!!” Ironically he lives next door to the crazy lady and her boy toy. If she’s not screaming obscenities, the boy toy is grinding metal at all hours of the day & night. Apparently that doesn’t bother the mean old guy but a leaf blower 4 houses away does.

There are a couple of dogs at the end of my street. They’re good pups, if a little barkey. The house directly across from their yard is for sale and they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. Strangers get barked at. They’re dogs, it’s normal. The mean guy loses his shit over that and has shouted some of the most horrific things about the female half of the couple who own the dogs. 

Honestly if it wasn’t that the husband is such a damn nice guy, he’d be completely within his rights to punch the mean old pot head out. To be honest if the husband did it, I’d pull a Sargent Schultz from Hogans Heroes  and “SEE NOTHING!”

The mean old pot head is  also quite frustrated most of the time. He’ll be trying to reach someone on the phone and well, it doesn’t go well. He loses things quite often. Either event will cause a stream of obscenities that can be heard all over the neighborhood. These obscenities don’t stop for literally hours.

I don’t want to be that guy…

I’d prefer to be generally happy, and peaceful.

It occurred to me the other day that he’s actually a coward. He’ll shout the most horrific things from the safety of his house at people that can’t see him and who might not realize where the shouted obscenity or complaint is coming from. In the event that someone was to challenge him he’d pull the pity me card, “I’m old, I don’t sleep well, I’m infirm, blah, blah, blah.

In other words I’ve lost all respect for him. He’s an old school troll. I should introduce him to social media. Perhaps that would entertain him more than waiting to scream, rant, & rave about someone living their life, on their property, in the neighborhood.

Lately, he’s gotten so much worse It’s become another incentive to leave and find someplace better to live.

I’ve been wondering if part of my problem is simply I need a change of pace. Perhaps I need to have some fun and put distance between my frustrations and myself for a few hours.

On the plus side, I’ve been exploring interesting music via Apple Music. Their algorithm has gotten pretty spot on in presenting me with choices of music that I’m likely to enjoy. Come to think of it, Hulu has also been much better at suggesting something to watch.

I’m not sure if that’s because the algorithms are better, or because I’m no longer sharing my accounts with anybody. That’s not a complaint, it’s one of those things you have as part of being a family.

Happy Summer Solstice!