New rules about apple picture storage meant I started looking for alternatives. I do not want to pay for cloud storage. Period the end.
So I downloaded Amazon pics app yesterday. An Amazon prime account offers unlimited free picture storage (but not unlimited video). I set it to automatically download my images but then wondered, if I exceed the free video storage amount are they gonna automatically subscribe me to one of the paid plans, thereby ruining my cloud work around? So I interrupted it.
Started looking through them. Lots of videos of the dog. And Lila, Billy’s dog.
Mostly though, it’s those collage slideshows that I’m sure you’ve seen. They’re important to me. Even though unsophisticated (I use only a free app and my phone to create them) they provide a record: what I was thinking about, what I was feeling. Attending to the repeated imagery reveals some themes: racial inequity, trauma, the overturning of Roe v Wade, trump’s destruction (ongoing).
I thought of posting a bunch of videos here and then deleting them from my phone but then wondered, what happens when I run out of the space offered by WordPress business (which is decidedly NOT free but which I kind of had to upgrade to after I ran out of the space afforded by the free WordPress platform)?
I’m not adept at this crap and I do wonder why $12.00 a year for the cloud (or whatever) is provoking this penurious response.
Are we allowed our inconsistencies? I spent $250 on annuals yesterday. Boom. And it wasn’t a first trip.
The fact that I get a wholesaler discount and saved $100 does not make the total a penny cheaper, but somehow it feels better? A tad victorious, even, which is a good thing when I am feeling defeated by so much else.
Where am I going with this post?
To the garden.
Garden notes:
** Almost all filling-in around the new patio was achieved with divisions. ** My new copper bird bath has yet to see any action (that I’ve observed), so I keep moving it. ** When I run out of steam, I put divisions on the curb and they are always taken. ** The feeders attract: blue jays, purple finches, nuthatches, sparrows and wrens, cardinals, woodpeckers. Yesterday I saw my first red-winged blackbird.
For those of you with more tech savvy, feel free to educate me. My husband and older son are blasé about this upcoming change. Maybe it only applies to “recent uploads” (1,000 pix) which apple used to automatically upload to cloud so they’d be available across devices — a feature that has never mattered to me because I don’t use my iPad for picture stuff and my laptop is not a Mac. Oy.
So the real limit I need to worry about is the storage in my phone. I guess.
It’s 60 degrees here. Crickets sing their autumnal songs. Hard not to feel blessed, with zero hurricanes coming at us and zero fires raging nearby. 
The finches are feeding on the echinacea seed heads near the side door. When I come out, they fly off, startled and pretty.
I am adding batting to the single-layer sections of the global warming quilt. Tricky. Fussy in a way that would be avoided if I were a Point-A-to-Point-B creator. Believe me, sometimes I wish I was.
But just look at that amaranth! It is one of the few glorious results of my seed planting efforts this year. Exactly ONE of the dozens of sunflower seeds I planted survived the rabbits.
The huge squash leaves came from a rogue seed that took root when a piece of compost fell into a yard waste bin and took off! I love how surprises arrive in the garden with a casual regularity that defy their miraculous nature.
So many plants thriving, I’ll try not to get too hung up on the climbing hydrangea that died this year (another victim of the black walnut?). Out back, we splurged and planted some decent-sized birches and a lovely large pine. They’re all beautiful and functional as screening and, as it turns out, economical because I no longer feel any urgency about replacing our fence.
