I know some people think I over-reacted to this whole thing. So someone took a photo of yours and posted it somewhere because they were just wanting to share a cute dog photo with others.You should be flattered. Big deal. Get over it. That may be, and for a short while after the first encounter I was coming around to that idea.

But … it’s more the way the whole thing went down with the person (after being asked nicely) to take the photo down and them refusing. Said person kind of threatened me at one point and said (I’ll paraphrase here since their English was so poor and lapsed into what I think was Dutch) “you know well where it comes from, so secure it, delete it or ...”. In other words they were admitting that they took it directly from my blog.

FaceBook was very quick to remove the first photo. Thank You, FaceBook!

But … when I went back to their site to check, what did I see but two more photos taken directly from the same blog entry—posted after the other photo was removed. I left a comment again regarding taking down the photos, but when I went back in a few minutes later that person had posted the same two photos again (first time the photos had the date stamp of being posted 15 hours ago; the second time the date stamp was having been posted 8 minutes ago) and had banned me from commenting. Now they were on there twice. So in essence this person was poking fingers at me. On purpose. A pay-back I guess for reporting them to FB. Kind of like haha I know where you are and I can do whatever I like, so there. Just plain nasty.

I have to tell you I felt violated. Just like when I had my wallet lifted from my purse in Paris. It’s not like the photos were on Flickr or Tumblr, they were on my blog. They entered my personal space. And they did it not once, but twice.

Finally with the help of Carolyn leaving multiple comments to remove the photos, he did, before FaceBook could remove them. Thank you, Carolyn for your tenacious terrier work!

Again, I know this kind of thing probably happens all the time in these days of “free sharing” but this one felt more like a violation in the way it was done. Like someone came into my home and robbed me and then thumbed their nose at me.

Did I overeact? Maybe. You decide. Either way, it’s over now. At least I hope so.

Thank you for listening.

(photo: Things Aren’t Always Black & White) half-wet tree; Skylands

Unfortunately I have had to close the entry on Hailey’s birthday. The person on FaceBook has now stolen two more photos to put on their FaceBook page from that same blog post and now I know for certain how the first photo ended up there in the first place. It’s disheartening to say the least. Especially since FaceBook did indeed remove the first offending photo. It’s enough to make me cry. Truly.

Not only my own meltdown-rant of yesterday, but quite literally. Everything is melting, including our lovely layer of ice from Monday’s ice storm. After being below freezing for a week, our temperatures popped up to nearly 50 degrees yesterday and today we’re supposed to encounter thunderstorms. Whoa .. thunder and lightning in January??

Finding that my photo had been posted on FaceBook without my knowledge or permission and the fact that the person was asked to remove it and would not, really got me riled up. A good friend did a search for me on that image and found that it was also posted to Pinterest and had been “pinned” a bunch of times. So, not much I can do about that. How many other ones have been pilfered? Makes one wonder.

After some help from the same friend for whom copyright infringement has been an issue, I figured out how to file a complaint against the person through FaceBook. After they told me to stop leaving them comments (I was not harassing, just responding to what they said to me.) or they would report me as SPAM, I left them a comment saying simply that I had reported them for copyright infringement : good luck. This morning when I checked, the person had deleted all their comments back to me, leaving only my one-sided conversation. The photo is still there.

{Off that topic!!}

Too cool myself off from my annoying FaceBook encounter I drove to Skylands for a walk. I needed to get out and about after being so cloistered in the frigid temps of last week. Plus, I find that there is nothing like a walk with the camera to turn my mood around. It wasn’t sunny and the sky was gray, and even though it was near 50 it didn’t feel like it. I still had on a scarf, jacket and fingerless gloves. At least my fingers weren’t freezing like my last walk.

I do love this bottom loop walk with the woods on both sides. As I walked along I had to stop several times just to sniff the air as a pungent scent assailed my olfactory senses. No, wait, ‘sniff’ is not quite right. I inhaled the pungent scent through my nose, pulling it in deeply, taking every aspect of it in and still I could not define it. It was not an autumn scent like the damp, rotting leaves that are left uncovered on the ground now that the snow has melted. It was not a non-scent like winter. No, it was something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. More like an awakening scent. Like spring. It smelled wonderful.

I passed quite a few people out walking enjoying the warmer air. Some with dogs, some with cameras, and some jogging. Everyone nodded and smiled as they went by. One man who was toting a camera asked if I was getting any good shots. I smiled, shrugged and said it was hard to say.

The pileated woodpecker did not make an appearance this time and his pond (it’s real name is Duck Pond but I am going to call it Pileated Pond) was starting to melt but nothing photo-worthy. There was,  however, a woman kneeling by the pond’s edge taking photos. I assumed she was taking photos of the ice or leaves caught in the ice? Whatever it was it had her full attention. When I drove by on my way out after my walk about 45 minutes later she was still there, still hunched over, snapping away. I was thinking she’s going to have a lot of photos that all look alike when she gets home, but she was enjoying herself and that’s all that matters in the end. I do hope she ended up with some shots she really liked.

The little pond on the other side of the loop from Pileated Pond (or it’s more like a swamp actually) was more interesting with its melting reflections.

Almost back to the parking lot I veered off the road and risked life and a few limbs on the slippery mud incline that led down to the stream which is still mostly covered in ice.

I also came across this little waterfall frozen in time as it cascaded over a fallen log.

My mood was much improved after my little walk.

Back on the home front, my little snow squirrel was having a meltdown of its own. I’m amazed that there is anything still left of him! After today/tonight’s expected torrent of rain I’m sure he’ll finally be gone.

(photos:)
‘Pooled’ Cover
Icicle Rock
Swamped Reflections x 3
Brown & White Stream
Frozen Cascade x 2
Snow Squirrel Meltdown

NOTE: I wrote this post last week and it’s been sitting here all this time. At first I didn’t know if I was actually going to post it because I don’t normally post rants. But something happened yesterday that just got me going all over again.

Here are a couple of things that perplex me.

Everybody’s an Author!
I read several blogs where the person is (supposedly) in the midst of writing a novel. We all know that just about anyone can self-publish a book these days and it doesn’t have to be good. The one woman who started out blogging about the same time I did, just posted a new blog entry a few days ago after a lapse of a month. She went on and on describing her “dinning” room in great detail. Frankly, it was boring. Not only was the writing not engaging but she used “dinning” instead of dining at least 12 times. Once she used it three times in a single paragraph. After the 12th “dinning” I stopped reading. Enough.

The other woman has published several self-help books for tweens but didn’t really write them herself. (More like she collected stories that other people had written and put them all together.) She has faked rave reviews of all her “books” on Amazon and someone even called her out on them. Now she claims to be writing a novel which is not an easy feat. She also has lots of typos and misuses of words on her blog which are annoying. Like describing a book she was reading and saying the heroine of the book was “abroad the Titanic.” Hmmm. I think you could be a broad (a not so nice word for a woman) on the Titanic, or you could be aboard the Titanic, but probably not abroad it.

I may not be a writer but at least I have the sense to turn on spell-checker! And you certainly won’t catch me abroad the Titanic in the dinning room. There you go.

Social Media
Maybe I am getting old, but I don’t get social media. I really don’t. I do have a Facebook account but I never post anything. I do read several other people (mostly old dog show friends) but that’s about it. I realize it’s a nice way for people to connect to other people they haven’t otherwise kept in touch with, but ... I don’t get it and I don’t like it.

And, as far as I am concerned Twitter and Tweet are what birds do. Not people. Do people really believe that all these celebrities sit around all day tweeting? If they have that much spare time to engage in such petty activities then they are obviously over paid.

And speaking of social media, who cares if some football player is heartbroken because he learned that he had an online “affair” with a girlfriend who didn’t really exist? I mean, talk about dumb. Yet we’ve heard about this every night on the news.

Or YouTube videos going viral? Isn’t that a word that is normally associated with disease? oops, again showing my age because now “viral” has a whole new meaning in an online dictionary. Pretty sad. Also sad is all those teens doing dumb things that could kill them just to get their videos to go viral.

Teens are bullied online. Photos have been posted that have caused suicides.

Social Media is contagious (for most people) and therefore could be considered a viral disease eating away at the fabric of our society.

{snip}

That was what I wrote last week. Yesterday my friend Carolyn called me to chat. She happened to mention that she had seen what she thought was the exact same photo of Hailey and her dam Diva that appeared on my blog last week on a site called Dog Lover on FaceBook. This one. She wondered if I had taken the photo or someone else did. No, I told her, it was my original photo and thought she must be mistaken.

But there was my photo, on this “Dog Lover” site for all to see and “share”. When I asked them to remove the photo since it was copyrighted on my site (I have to assume this is how they got it?) they replied that “many people have this photo now because we all share on FB, so I won’t take it down.” What? Share? There is no “sharing” when something is not yours to share! I was fuming. Still am since I had some back and forth with this person just a few minutes ago. They are still refusing to remove it. What is wrong with people?

I tried to look up how to report it and just got pages and pages of stuff. To report copyright infringement you have to file a claim, blah, blah, blah. I’m pissed but I’m not sure I want to go through all that. It’s not like I am some great photographer whose photos make them money. But it’s the principal of the whole thing.

The best I could do was click “this is harassing me” regarding the photo which I am sure they will not see anything harassing about a cute little dog and its mother. Sigh. Before I clicked the button “report to FaceBook” a little thing popped up that requested I first ask the person to take the photo down. Been there; done that. I clicked the button. My last comment to the person was that I had reported them. I also told them that I didn’t have access to all those sites that now supposedly had my photo on it, but if they would remove it from theirs at least it would stem the flow of “sharing” to even more sites.

Did I say I hate FaceBook? Am I alone in this?

I was also going to talk about cell phone usage but maybe I’ll just save that for another day.

I am still not certain how my photo ended up on FaceBook anyway. Just a reminder to anyone that reads this blog, there is a copyright notice under my “About” in regards to usage of photos. Please do not use any photos on my blog without my permission. Please ask before “sharing”. I guess I am going to be looking into putting copyrights on my photos themselves.

P. S. This just in from the person on FB after I said I had reported them. (misspellings are theirs, not mine!)

dog lover wrote: “Everrything on the internet is not secure state public.If you have dogs ,you may be proud of. I wish you many fun by Dog lover. greetings”

And now I have steam coming out of my ears!!!

UPDATE: I have figured out (thanks to Rick B.) how to report this person, so now I have a copyright infringement filed with FaceBook against this person. We’ll see how it goes!

(photos: Alone on Thin Ice) Green Turtle Pond

Today our house will be without power for about five hours. On purpose! Today is the day we have a new electrical panel installed complete with a transfer switch for routing our generator into the household circuitry. It’s not the best planning since it’s still below freezing during the daytime, but today is the day the electrician had the time.

We’ve bumped the heat up about five degrees higher than we normally keep it to get the house really warm and the wood fire is burningly brightly.

We plan to hang out in the sun room around the wood stove for the duration of our power outage. We’ll put up the card table and start a puzzle. I’ve got plenty of books for reading (thanks to my library visit) and my iPad is fully charged. For lunch we’ll probably load the dogs in the truck and eat somewhere in town or maybe we’ll venture up to the winery café.

It’s an inconvenience, but one we hope we’ll be glad we did next time the power goes out for real. Until then we’ll just do all we can to stay warm!

(photo: eBay last night cuddling with Rick’s wooly hand-knitted slippers [knit by me!])