This praying mantis was in the sink on the deck, not a very good place for a photograph. When I tried to get it to change position, it flew over into Pink Iceberg. I had to pul out my flashlight to light it, and it was staring at me like “what are you doing?”  He’s a cute little guy.

Server repairs are ever so slow. The RAID utility was unable to build a RAID 5 out of the three new drives I installed yesterday. I think one of the drives is bad, so I pulled it and am now seeing if the RAID utility can build a RAID 1 out of the other two drives.  I found a new RAID card and ordered it, but it will take at least a week to ship, so I’ve started migrating databases and websites to another server from the backups. I have a few sites restored, but migration to another server from backups is a slow processes, as well.

Lola is expressing how I feel today.

In the grand tradition of everything breaking at the same time, the RAID failed in one of our servers at work, taking the server down. The problem is that the RAID utility shows all three drives are good, which, if it’s not lying, would indicate a possible failure in the RAID card, because it normally takes two drives to go bad at the same time to take down a RAID 5; however, the system profiler is saying the RAID card is good, which, if it’s not lying, would indicate at least two drives have gone bad at the same time, which is really rare. The other possibility is the drives got out of sync and the RAID card can’t re-sync the drives. All of this makes trouble shooting very difficult and frustrating; Currently, there is no quick or easy fix; therefore I have my ears back like Lola.

The PET scan was little changed from the last scan, which is great news. Two lymph nodes that showed elevated SUV in the last scan had none in this scan, and another node that had an SUV of 4.2 in the last scan was 4.0 in this scan. An SUV of 5 or lower is considered physiological, and since that node didn’t increase its SUV over the past two months, it’s not cancer. Therefore, I am still in complete remission. My next PET scan is in December.

A Painted Lady butterfly and a lot of bumble bees were on the echinacea this morning

My plans for today were to irrigate, clean house, cook and make a flash set up for photographing backlight flowers, fruit and other things; however, I ended up working on the truck and spending a lot of time working on the swamp cooler.  I think I was up on the roof a dozen times today.

While working on the swamp cooler yesterday, I noticed that pads had gotten pretty well calcified. I got new pads at Lowe’s yesterday, but, of course, they were out of the right sized pads, and are not getting any more this season. So I had to buy larger pads. The box stores complain about people buying on-line, but when they can’t figure out the right supply, I have no sympathy. For almost anything else I would have left the store and ordered on-line, but I knew I could make the larger pads work, and didn’t want to wait for the correct sized pads to ship.

I installed the new pads in first thing this morning, then the pump quit working. I hadn’t planned to go out anywhere today, but I had to go out and get a new pump for the swamp cooler, so I made a run to Costco while I was out. I installed the new pump, and it worked so well that the cooler started sucking water off the oversized pads into the cooler and dripping on the floor. After investigating the issue, I determined it’s a flaw in the cooler and tried one remedy. That didn’t work, so I ended up sealing the problem area with silicone.

The kitty water fountain started leaking, so I have to replace it. I didn’t even bother going to PetsMart or Petsco out here. I searched and found a really elegant, ceramic kitty fountain on Amazon and ordered it.

The only critter I ran into at 3:30 this morning when I went out to let the irrigation water in was a skunk. I tried to do a photo but only got a grainy photo of his tail up looking like he’s aiming at me.

I did make one of the best green chile, chicken enchiladas I’ve ever made. The only reason it’s not the best is because I had to use frozen green chile from Costco.

Stretch was working on math with Laurie when she got this series of him working on a problem. He wasn’t shy about showing off after he “licked” the problem. I suppose it’s the kitty equivalent of blowing the smoke of the barrel of a pistol.

I spent most of the day working on the yard, the truck, the swamp cooler, the mower and doing some house work. Our dishwasher died, so now we have to wash dishes by hand. We’ve gone through two dishwashers in three years. This one just quit working. Seems to be a problem with the electronics. We have problems with water pressure, but I don’t know how low water pressure would cause the electronics to mess up.

I did manage to get out in the afternoon and do a few photos.

While I was cooking dinner, I looked out the window and saw a porcupine lumbering by. I grabbed my camera and ran out to photograph it. The minute it heard me come out on the deck it ran to the shed and started making its way through the junk to the trees on the side of the deck. I wanted to get a good profile photo of it, but it can move really fast when it feels like it. I got a photo of it between a dolly and a box on its way to squeeze between the shelves and the wheelbarrow to get to the safety of the tress.

Since I was photographing the porcupine, Guildenstern came lumbering over to check it out. Guildenstern is a big cat, but the porcupine is about 3 times the size of Guildenstern. I grabbed Guildenstern before he got more than he bargained for and put him in the house. The porcupine climbed up in the tree.

We got a couple of downpours today. We got a really short but intense downpour at the office that produced enough rain to fill up the cover on one of our staff’s motorbike cover and knock the motor bike over. Everything was wet when I got home tonight.

We’ve been sitting out on the deck in the cool of the evening tonight listening to Marco Antonio Solis in concert at the Sandia Casino Amphitheater. I hadn’t heard anything by him before tonight.

The clouds that produced some of tonight’s thunderstorms were building up when I left the office around 5:00 this afternoon.

I think I’m having a slight reaction to the injection I got for the PET scan. The left side of my face is slightly numb and my teeth and gums hurt, making it difficult to talk.

I got quite a surprise tonight when I turned on the lights in the catio and stepped out to find a baby skunk, skunking around. I got my camera, but the little skunk stayed against the wall in the shadows where I couldn’t photograph it. It finally crawled through the wire under the steps and disappeared. I guess they can get their bodies through anything they can get their heads through — or else  there is a skunk worm hole under the steps. The wire is the same 1.5 X 3 inches under the steps where the skunk disappeared as it is everywhere in the catio.  I see I’m going to have to put chicken wire around the bottom of the catio in the near future.

The three photos were done this morning and this afternoon with my new Olympus E-620 and Le Long Lens.

I got an Olympus E-620 camera. It’s a four thirds camera so it uses the same lenses as my Lumix L10. The E-620 has 12.3 mega pixels and a wide range of features, especially manual and a combination manual/auto features the L10 doesn’t have. One really nice feature is auto focus with fine manual focus adjustment. But what I was really going for is the extra mega pixels. Since so many of my wildlife photos have had to be farther away from the critters than I would like to be, the extra mega pixels, plus the noise reduction, should help improve the clarity on some of the critter photos.

Now I can keep the big lens on one camera and the macro on the other and be prepared for critters big and small.

I got home pretty late again tonight, so all I had time to photograph with the new camera was Bella Roma, taken with Le Long Lens in a light rain.

My PET was much the same as it ever was. I have a doctor appointment next Monday to get the results.

My new glasses came in today so now I can see clearly again.

There were really great clouds all-round on the way home tonight. I only got a couple of photos, however.

With family in town and prep for my PET scan tomorrow, the night went by leaving little time to blog. A lucky toad was the subject for tonight’s photo.