Ahhhhhh...TV

It's so nice to be able to sit, drink my coffee, and watch the morning news. (My God! Oil is at $99.29 a barrel!)

Satellite guy has restored tv. He tried his best to mount it up on the house somewhere. Actually spent 2 hours trying to find spots that would work so the moose couldn't reach it, but the trees just seem to be in all the wrong places. Since we are unwilling to cut down any more for signal reception (we cut several down last summer-another nasty story), we have no choice but to have the dish at the bottom of the hill.

He replaced the old dish completely. The original dish was one of those wide ones with 3 white nobs (that's as technical as I can get). Dish Network has 3 satellites out in space. Two are to the south (110 and 119) and are 'regular' channels. The third is to the southeast (129) and sends out the HD channels. The wide dish can be pointed to pick up all three signals. Not so easy here, in an area fraught with large trees and surrounded by mountains. They don't do the wide dish around here anymore. If you order HD, you get two dishes. One for HD, one for the rest. So he had no wide dish to replace with. Thus, we now have two dishes, on poles, at the bottom of the hill.

First words out of Sweet Hubby's mouth when he got home and saw them. "Oh, so now they have two targets." Referring to the moose, of course.

This Thanksgiving weekend, besides putting up the Christmas tree, we are putting up a fence around the dishes. Welcome to north Idaho.

By the way, I have not seen a single moose since obtaining the paint pistol. Can moose smell guns?

I finished knitting the Garter Rib socks Monday night. I blocked them yesterday. I also finished another beaded ornament cover. I am having serious camera trouble so have not been able to take pics yet. I spent half the day yesterday trying to find a solution to the problem.

I have a Sony MavicaCD 400 camera. It doesn't use a smart card. Instead, it has a little disk drive inside it, and uses the little mini cd-rw's. It takes unbelievably fantastic pics, which are then put on the disk in jpg format. You can pop that little disk into any computer and look at the pics instantly. However, before doing that, the disk must be 'finalized' by the camera first.

Usually, I take pics, finalize, transfer pics from disk to computer, then unfinalize to take more pics. Repeat-as often as I want. A disk will hold 90 pics, or a few minutes of video (my camera does video too). For some reason I can't unfinalize. The camera either freezes up (requiring a reboot), or it screws up the disk making it unusable.

I tried reformatting the disks, but the camera is causing disc errors, again rendering the disks unusable. I've lost 4 disks worth of pics this week trying to solve the problem. (Fortunately, I had the good sense to copy the pics onto my computer before trying anything-whew!)

Yesterday I worked on making my camera compatible with my laptop computer. It has a usb port and cord with the ability to connect to the computer so pics can be downloaded directly from the camera-without the need to finalize. Unfortunately, the driver that came with the camera is not compatible with Windows XP (which gives you an idea how old the camera is). Most of my time yesterday was spent trying to find a driver to download off the web. I found one. Then it was trying to figure out how to install it. Not easy for me cos I'm lacking in hardware knowledge, but eventually I figured it out. It works! I spent 5 minutes dancing, singing the song "I am woman, hear me roar!" (Helen Reddy) and asking my daughter for high fives.

Later today I will take pics of the socks and whatnot. It's not the most efficient way of doing things. It takes almost 20 minutes to download a full disk worth of pics. But it's better than taking pics and then losing them.

In the meantime...

Dear Santa,
I know you're pretty busy making toys up there at the north pole. In fact, with the deadline just over a month away, it's probably downright crazy. However, if you could find the time, I'd really appreciate it if you could get the elves to put together a new digital camera for me. That's what I want for Christmas. I've done my best to be a good girl this year and feel I really deserve it.

Take care,
Linda Jo

P.S. I will be leaving a glass of milk and a plate of cheese for you, as usual.


Have a great day.