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

High atop a snow bank in the grocery store parking lot, there sits a lonely little grocery cart. It’s been stuck in the snow since the Christmas storms when it got swept up by the snow plows. It almost made a break for freedom during our recent thaw, but got caught once again in the plow’s path in our storm earlier this week.

I feel kind of sorry for it. Left out of the daily cart round-ups. No one to push it through the heated, well-lit aisles. It’s spacious basket not filled up with goodies that it was meant to hold.

With our expected below-freezing daytime temperatures this coming week I think it might be there for a while.

I shot this photo of our pool cover after a heavy frost about a month or so ago before the snows came (and stayed). It looked like a smiley face to me. Or maybe the pool was taunting me (neh neh neh neh neh neh you can’t swim in me!) Either way, it caught my eye.

Hopefully this will be my last post before the new look for the blog will be revealed. We are getting so close! I’m so excited to have a new, fresh look. I can’t promise that the content will be new and fresh—just the daily life of a ‘new’ Jersey Girl as it unfolds day by day.

I did manage to go over to Skylands on Friday, but it was a rather disappointing trip. The constant freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw of our snowpack has left a solid sheet of ice in spots as I found out when I tried to go cross-country instead of keeping to the paved areas. I slipped my way to the slimy bullfrog pond only to find it with barely a covering of ice and looking very un-photographable. My next slippery stop was the koi and lily pad trench which I found out they drain completely in winter. Even the Duck Pond was boring as it was totally frozen over with a heavy sheet of ice and no reflections to be seen. I would have walked the loop but I didn’t have a hat on my head and a nasty little wind was blowing. I went home. This was the only shot I took the whole time.

With the warmer temperatures this weekend we hope to get down the Christmas decorations outside. I think the lights on the trees have unfrozen by now and the snow has shrunk enough to gather up the extension cords that are on the ground. I am tired of looking at them.

One of my amaryllis has a bud coming! I think it’s the oldest one of the three, and if so it will be its sixth year or so of blooming. It’s going to be a small one, but still—six years of consecutive blooms! The other two are still not showing any signs of a bud issuing forth but they still have nice green leaves. I was contemplating cutting them off with the thinking behind it of them putting all their energy into the leaves and not in producing a bud, but my master gardner neighbor Aileen nipped that idea in the bud (so to speak). She told me not to cut them. So, I guess I’ll wait and see what happens. I’ve treated them the same way I have every year so there should be no difference.

Next up: the big reveal!

Sorry. I couldn’t come up with a better title! The new blog site is coming along albeit slowly. It’s harder to work on it with Rick and I trading chats throughout the day while he’s at work about the formatting, font style, etc. I can only hope that when we’re through I like it and most people reading like it as well. Hopefully the new look will be revealed next week. At least that is what we are aiming for. I don’t want to drag this out too long!

The little common redpolls have moved on as predicted. I still see one or two on the finch sock, but it’s been taken over by goldfinches and I’ve even seen a few sparrows on it pecking away. I am wishing now I had participated in Project Feeder Watch run by Cornell. I would have except for the fact that right now our main bird feeder hangs in such a way that I can’t actually see the birds when they are on it. Our hanger makes it too low and it’s hard to remedy that easily since the hanger attaches to the deck railing. I figured I couldn’t get a good enough bird count without actually seeing them on the feeder. I would love to do this, so maybe I should be thinking ahead for next year and plan out a feeder strategy.

Our weather is warming up and our frozen snowpack is slowly melting. Fifty degrees is the predicted temperature for this upcoming weekend! It’s not my preference as I like winter to be winter. Plus, I really like looking out the window and seeing the ground covered in white instead of all those brown fallen leaves. It makes it so easy to see things in the woods, like the deer roaming around. But, it seems there is always a January warm-up each year around the same time. Even in Colorado this was true.

But I’m a Winter Girl. Born in winter; raised in winter. See?

There is supposedly an arctic blast coming next week. Not sure if there is any moisture around for snow though.

We’ve been having issues for a couple of months now with itchy and scratchy dogs. Alex developed big oozing hot spots from chewing and Bella woke us up from sound sleeps scratching. We had multiple vet visits. First one said flea allergies but we had not seen any fleas on anyone. So, they put them on a steroidal allergy medication which seemed to do not much. Back again and they said well, they probably have a skin infection now since the skin was breached, so antibiotics. Again, not much happened to relieve the itchy and scratchy show.

I could never seem to get in to the vet I like best at the clinic because I wanted an appointment pronto and he is harder to get in to see. I wanted the vets to see the areas of concern on the dogs while they were looking fresh. The first vet had said well, it could be scabies but I doubt it since she said we would be scratching and presenting with a rash too.

Long story short: the dogs have now been diagnosed with canine scabies, more commonly known as mange. Ewwww. Mangy dogs! Mange is caused by mites that get underneath the skin. On our last visit to the vet (and the vet I wanted) he took a scraping from Alex’s skin and found a mite under the microscope. Hurrah! Finally. Why didn’t the other vets take a scraping??

The vet said mange is more common than you’d think since we live around so much wildlife here. He said they could have picked it up in the driveway or the yard. I suspect these two “mangy” foxes that come around. Ugly, eh? We also have some suspicious looking squirrels who are always scratching. Or it could have been at the last groomer’s since it started right after their last grooming.

It’s easy enough to treat with a product called Revolution which is like Frontline except that it treats different things (like mites and heart worm). Revolution is right. Let’s lead a revolt against those terrible mites! Be gone! After only one application the dogs are already showing improvement. Hallelujah!

So, that about catches you up on what’s been going around here. I hope to get away from the usual household routine today and spend a little time at Skylands. We’ll see if that works out.