I remember ripping an ad out of an old magazine when I was a kid. I don’t know where the picture went. When the internet became a thing, I started looking for it online but never with any luck, until I just today thought of asking the AI.
Me: Can you find a picture for me? It was in a magazine I saw back in the 80s (but could have been from an older magazine) I think it was an ad for some kind of whiskey. It had a mountain man out in the woods wearing a long fur coat.
ChatGPT: I’m pretty sure you’re remembering the Yukon Jack campaign—tagline “The Black Sheep of Canadian Liquors.” Late-70s/early-80s print ads often showed a fur-clad trapper/mountain man by a snowy lake or forest, sometimes quoting Robert Service. Here are examples of the exact layout and imagery from that series.
Me: YES THAT’S IT!!!! That’s wonderful, thank you, I always thought that looked so romantic.
ChatGPT said: I’m glad I could track it down for you! ✨ Those old Yukon Jack ads really leaned into that rugged, romantic frontier vibe—half whiskey promotion, half daydream of living out in the wild with a fur coat and a campfire.
HA. The machine gets it!
Yes indeed. I remember looking at that ad as a teenage girl and thinking that there is a real man, who no doubt sewed that coat together himself, out of the skins of things that tried, and failed, to eat him.
I’ve been looking for that ad since my darling started talking about Alaska. He was going to go up to Alaska in an old wood boat to see if he could survive the winter.
I didn’t miss that “IF”.
Well, the boat part didn’t work out.
And I’m just as glad we didn’t go to Alaska after he told me it rains more than western Washington! I’ve been trying to escape the consarned rain for thirty years now.
We went east and got just the good parts instead, the snow and trees and the c-c-c-cold. Break out the fur.
(I didn’t kill that poor little furry dude. He’s a third-hand donation.)
Long ago when I first read books about dogs, the standard advice was to give your new puppy a hot water bottle and a ticking clock, so it will miss its mother less. As if any baby mammal would not be able to tell the difference between a mother and a clock.
I just checked, and they’ve upgraded the standard advice to at least putting the dog’s pen in your bedroom so it won’t be so lonely, “and if the dog cries, comfort him briefly but don’t make a big deal out of it.”
Still sounds like baby dog abuse to me.
It’s about instinct. A dog on its own is a dead dog. They need the pack. If they find themselves alone, their crying is for survival.
Can you make a human go to sleep in a hammock hung from a steel cable ten stories high? “GO TO SLEEP, stop whining, you’re perfectly safe.”
I say the humans should put their spoiled human self down there on the floor and comfort that poor critter. Here’s my baby dog’s first night home. We had a lovely night.
I slept on the floor with her for the first week, and after that she was comfortable and didn’t mind sleeping in her bed.
Here’s how to tell it’s going to be a grand day!
Here’s the baby dog having her first ride home.
Now she rides on my lap to everywhere!
If she isn’t allowed in my lap for some reason, she’s sad. It’s baby dog abuse 🙁 It doesn’t happen often since my wardrobe now is chosen for how it will look covered in black hair and paw prints, but still, sometimes…
That’s the baby dog’s idea of staying in the back seat.
“Why don’t you love me any more Mommy :-(”
I didn’t pose this one, but here she is along with the shopping bag I made out of her dog food bag!
My mother would let us pick our birthday cake. My sister always had Bonbon Ribbon Torte (layers of thin cookie with raspberry sauce and whipped cream), my brother liked pineapple upside down cake, and I wanted chocolate chip cake. The recipe was something my sister clipped out of a magazine back in the 60s.
Here we are.
Chocolate Chip Cake
2 eggs 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 tsp vanilla 1 cup sour cream 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 2 cups flour 12 oz choc chips
Cream soft ingredients together, combine dry and mix.
Bake in greased and floured cake pan at 350° for 45 min or until a toothpick comes out clean.
I had a butterfly apron I couldn’t use for an apron because I don’t like the shape. I was waiting for some use for the butterflies as motifs. Finally, the first use! Patching a hole in a screen. I zigzagged around the butterfly, then tacked it to the screen by hand. When the sun comes through, it looks intentional!
Messing around with WordPress and having SO MUCH FUN!
I was recently upgraded to version 6.1 while I wasn’t watching (away from keyboard for a while, but automatic updates had been left on) and wouldn’t be all that happy about it except that I’m a WP fan and therefore enthusiastic about whatever they do. Full site editing is the latest thing. I tangled with that for a whole day or two without any luck, then after banging my head against every wall in sight, discovered a series of useful new-to-me things, both related and un.
I had recently installed a WP for my Vicky, promising her that it’s easy and fun and then it turned into everything else but that, because it only takes a few months to suddenly not know what you’re doing any more. Full site editing is too bleeding edge for me, I guess.
But Vicky came up with the FAIRY theme, and it’s every bit as clean and simple as the Basic theme (no kidding, that’s the name of it) that I had been using before, but more up to date. We’re back to the good old days of crop a banner to these dimensions, pick some colors and then get on with our lives. It took me half an hour to produce a brilliant pink candy cane theme from a random image of flowers from Wiki Commons.
To get the images right I downloaded a bunch of “free, easy” image crop things, but eventually they all failed and I had to revert to ibisPaint. I had been avoiding that because I didn’t know how to use it, but after ten minutes of really trying, I started to get it to work and it’s AMAZING and does so much more, not only cropping to dimensions, but semi-transparent layers, clone brushing, etc. And it works offline! I have a new tool!
Speaking of offline. I’ve been wishing and searching for some way to compose posts offline, other than copying and pasting text and assembling with pictures later. Up at my cold new home there’s just one place on the hill where the phone gets signal, not enough to make calls, but texts go through, and emails if they’re brief enough. I can even load images if they’re small enough. But it’s so cold! I don’t want to stand out there a minute longer than necessary. I’d like to compose a post inside where it’s warm, then go outside to the signal spot and hit UPLOAD. I still need to share my fabbdalous nonsense with the world!
The WordPress app does work offline, for composing posts, and queuing images for upload, but cannot, as far as I can see, do both at the same time. Can’t add an image from your device into the post and then upload – or it’s, “failure: image not loaded”. Also can’t upload images in one session and add them to the post in the next – the Media tab forgets them and there’s no way to insert them because, “failure: not connected”. Hmph.
Bouncing around ideas, I even thought for a while of good old html and a text editor. I could share a link to a directory with some basic pages and pictures, then go up to the phone zone, fire up FTP and… argh, there we are, fiddling in the cold with hurting fingers.
Then I found the solution! Posting by email, YAYYY! The “Postie” plugin. They mention “journalists in foreign countries” as the ones who may find this feature useful, but it’s also cool in other cold places, like up on my hill where EMFs are only frying your brains, just a little bit, in one spot.
Now I have this FABBDAlous new theme, AND I can throw some content at it from anywhere!
That came from https://imagecolorpicker.com/ analyzing my picture of flowers. One of the light pinks happens to be #fabbda.
UPDATE:
Nov 2023. Found out Fairy is nagware, and there’s no rage like love to hatred turned. Just when I thought the whole theme thing was settled and not on my to-do list any more, Fairy started popping up with the most ANNOYING messages, top and center of the WP dashboard:
“Hey there! We notice you’ve been using Fairy for some time…” and a request for payment. The way it’s phrased reminds me of a security guard posted at the store entrance: “Hey there! I notice you have an item tucked under your arm…”
I complained on the Fairy theme message board and had a long, frustrating convo with the devs who insist the messages can be got rid of. Sure they can, until next time you sign in.
Anger about that was just the motivation I needed to get me off my lazy butt and do a little bit of reading about FSE. Guess what, I figured it out!
I’m now using Twenty Twenty Three and absolutely love it. Just a bit of work to get over the hump, and now I feel like WordPress is back the way it should have been all along except UNLIMITED power and control. You can make your site look exactly the way you envisioned it, starting from scratch, as easy as drawing a layout on a blank canvas. This is better than CSS alone, better than any super-customizer theme (I’ve tried all of those). You can customize as much or as little as you please.
Wah-hoo, I’m so excited about 6.2! By the time I write this, 6.4 and it just keeps getting better and better.
What on earth caused this? Who could have poked these holes in our water jug? Maybe a woodpecker? I couldn’t imagine any dog that could reach up that high and make just those two distinct holes without any damage from the other teeth.
We puzzled over it for a while, then looked at the other side of the table. Our visitor left tracks.
With bears in mind, here’s a video I’ve been thinking of making for a while, about a poor bear that sang on the day it died.
I’ve looked a bit on the internet but I don’t see much about bear song. Only “singing bears” in variety shows.
I looked it up later and found that bears croon to comfort themselves when they are stressed. Wouldn’t they do it in a zoo, then, and someone could capture it on video? If you know where there might be a recording of bear croon, do tell me about it. I couldn’t find anything.
Well, I’ve heard it, and if that’s really such a rare thing, then it seems like I should share what it sounded like. I can’t mimic it exactly. The intervals were not like ours. It was four notes over and over, high down somewhere between a fourth and fifth lower, then up a bit then again, even lower.
I want to add a funny detail. It was after the bear was dead and its body being winched up onto a trailer. My goodness but it stank!
Only little Cindy had been free earlier in the night and treed the bear by herself. Now all three dogs were loose and they danced around the dead bear, growling fearsomely. You should have seen the silly things, with their hair standing up all over their bodies; not just their hackles but all over, so they looked like one of those “Here’s a cow that’s been washed and blow dried” pictures.
I would also like to mention fear of bears. Somehow my darling is under the impression that I am scared of bears. I’ve heard him say it a few times, for instance when neighbors talk about a bear coming through their backyard, and he’ll say, “Don’t let her hear that!”
I eventually addressed it. “Do you mean ME?”
Then he tried to use logic to prove to me that I am afraid of bears.
Am I afraid of bears? Have I said so?
He says I have.
Hmmm. Well I do say things sometimes and not remember it later.
Apparently in Washington our chances are one in two million of being killed by a bear. Our chances are one in one hundred of being killed in a car accident, that is ONE PERCENT which is terrible, and yet we all hit the road without a second thought. If we ever saw a bear munching on a person we’d call ourselves traumatized, but we’re used to seeing ambulances driving away from car crashes.
The video shows me jump when a branch snaps behind me. But I am sitting where there was a bear less than 12 hours earlier. I think some caution is reasonable. At least as much caution as if I was filming on a lawn chair in the middle of a county road. Is there a car coming?
At the end of the video I said I’m CHECKIN’, with an apostrophe rather than a G. I didn’t say “I’m chicken.”
After all, there might have been a person behind me. The chances of being killed by a male human age 18 to 24 whom you randomly encounter in the woods are far greater than when meeting a bear under similar circumstances. Hundreds of people are shot every year by hunters in this country, and a dozen or so killed, while bears average three. That last statistic seems the most relevant since there, at least, we’re limiting by people who were out in the woods.
But I have fewer stone hard opinions than I used to. I might be wrong. I might be afraid of bears.
Wolves, now. I tell ya what, the idea of wolfies kinda creeps me out. I don’t like the thought of the whole pack of bad doggies circling around with their hungry, glowing eyes, waiting for the fire to die down so they can crunch up my amazing hands for the calorie value. I read about that in Jack London when I was too young.
What did I do with the water that was in that container? Water is a precious commodity, so I didn’t waste it, although I did set it apart, labeled appropriately.
P.S.
There. Just came across what happened to the poor creature all those years ago.
Nothing says “ancient times” like a bear skin on your bed, and I wanted that. But I was fourteen. Some adult paid a bunch of money to have that poor creature made into this. It’s only a poor joke, if you ask me, as the bear didn’t look like that at any point, only hummed sadly all night and then died. A waste of money and a waste of a bear. What use is making its skull into a trip hazard? It was on the floor very briefly, then went into a box, and eventually was sold.
