Hoodwinked

Timothy Price46 Comments

The newly wired-in deck in panorama.

Before Spunk disappeared, we were not allowing the big cats to go out freely. Since the kittens seemed to be on the verge of figuring out the kitty door to the rest of the house, we didn’t want an open kitty door that would let them outside. I have plans to extend the catio, but since the kitties always want to be with us on the deck, I decided to wire in the deck so we can open the kitty door and they can go out and hang out on the deck, but they can’t go beyond the deck.

I added three doors where the steps to the deck are and wired in the rest of the deck. The whole time I was working on it the kitties were in the catio meowing at me to let them onto the deck and beyond. I kept telling them to hold on, I was almost done. When I finished hanging the double doors, I opened the kitty door and called at cats to come out on the deck. They came running but soon became very confused that they were wired in, separated from the great outdoors beyond the deck. They felt hoodwinked. So far Sasha is the only kitty taking advantage of access to the deck and the deck furniture. All the kitties liked lounging on the deck before it was wired in. I think Loki, Silver, and Marble are being defiant and registering the kitty complaints for being hoodwinked.

Sasha lounging on the chaise lounge.

The newly wired-in deck in super-wide-angle.

Sasha on a comfy cushion. She doesn’t feel hoodwinked. She appreciates access to the deck.

Silver: “Give me free access to the great outdoors or give me couch!”

 

No Spunk

Timothy Price61 Comments

One of the last photos of Spunk before he disappeared.

I sadly have to report that Spunk is missing. He has been gone for almost a fortnight. He had been up to his usual game of coming to the window, making Laurie interrupt her class to let him in, and then he would go through the house, back outside, walk around the house and show up at the window again. Then he didn’t show up at the window, not surprising, as he often found other things to get into.  When I came home from work, he was not waiting for me as usual. He wasn’t always waiting for me, but most of the time he was there. He had disappeared for more than a day a few weeks earlier. We figured he’d found a friend at one of the neighbor’s. Spunk is a social kitty and very friendly with strangers.

The next day after he didn’t come home, I called neighbors and stopped by and asked neighbors if they had seen Spunk. None of the near neighbors remembered seeing him. I called animal control, but they had no cats recently.  Since we have ended end up with cats for weeks on end that turned out to belong to neighbors several properties over we didn’t know, we are still hoping Spunk is at someone’s house and will eventually get out and come home.

Deer at Dusk

Timothy Price38 Comments

White-tailed deer on the Rio Grande at dusk.

A white-tailed deer came out of the bosque on the east side to the Rio Grande to forage on a sandbar. This is the first deer I have seen in the bosque and along the river.

 

Colorful Crow Highway

Timothy Price40 Comments

Coming in from the north.

The crow highway was in full swing at dusk with thousands of crows flying south over the Rio Grande and bosque.

Heading south.

The Sandias in dusk purple make a beautiful background.

A lone crow taking a break in a cottonwood that stands between the clearwater ditch and the irrigation ditch.

 

MacMemories From 1984

Timothy Price57 Comments

I’ve been cleaning out shelves in my office area and I came across the media packets that came with the first Macintosh we got in 1984 followed by the first Macintosh Plus we got in 1986. The Macintosh had 128K of RAM and one 3.5 inch diskette drive, no hard drive. The process for using it was 1) you booted the computer with the System diskette. 2) You ejected the system diskette and inserted the Program diskette and opened the program, such as MacPaint. 3) You MacPainted to create your graphics. 4) You selected Save to save your graphic file, which ejected the Program diskette. 5) You inserted a diskette to save your file. 6) If the diskette wasn’t formatted, then you would have to click on Yes to format the diskette, and 7) save your file.

I’m trying to remember if when you quit the Program and Shut Down the Macintosh if it asked you to put the Program diskette and then the System diskette back in before it shut down, or if it simply ejected whichever diskette was in the drive before it shut down. I think there was a lot of ejecting and inserting the different diskettes before it shutdown.

We got an external disk drive with the first Macintosh Plus, which meant we could have a program diskette in the computer and a file diskette in the external drive. Our next Macintosh plus had two disk drives. We got external hard drives for the Macintosh Pluses before the SEs and SE/30s came out with internal hard drives. When we got one Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh Laserwrtier in 1986, the pair cost over $10,000 — around $3K for the Macintosh Plus and $7K for Laserwriter. That’s around $23,700 ($7.1K and $16.6K respectively) in 2020 dollars. Macintosh computers always came with the system software and at least a sample of programs.

Those were the really expensive, bad old days of computing. The first IBM PC we got, with similar specs (it had two 5.25″ floppy drives) was around $3K in 1981 (~$8,600 today) plus you had to buy whichever DOS you wanted to use, plus buy the programs, the drivers, etc. Nowadays you can easily pay $7,000 or $24,000 or more for a new Macintosh Pro. However, you get a lot of CPUs, RAM, and disk space for the money and a lot of powerful programs included in the price. But most computers today cost a fraction of what they did in the bad old days of computing.