Why FedEx sucks

NC State sent my basketball tickets by FedEx.  I want to make sure I get them before we leave on our trip, so I have been watching the tracking info.  The predicted delivery date was Nov 6th, tomorrow.

On Nov 3rd, at 5:24 in the morning, my tickets land in Salt Lake.  By 7:18 they are at the sorting facility in West Valley.  On the 3rd, which is a Saturday, they simply flag the package as "Package not due for delivery".  OK, I get it.  You pay extra for Saturday delivery. They could have thrown it on a truck, but they chose not to.

Two days later, on Monday the 5th, they once again tag the package as "not due for delivery" and leave it sitting over at the sorting facility.  Apparently with FedEx, they refuse to perform any better than their estimated delivery, even if the package has been sitting around for  a few days, 40 miles from being delivered.

I have had a number of UPS packages arrive early.  Seems they like exceeding expectations or at least getting the packages out from under foot. I won't be using FedEx any time soon.

- Steve Joyce

Volunteering for RINS.

I like volunteering.  I like nature and photography.  When they come together it's nice.  I met some interesting people in my Leadership Park City class and one of them, Colleen, is a birder.  We were talking about birding in the area and she mentioned that she used to volunteer for RINS, Raptor Inventory Nest Survey. They use volunteers to track the nests and babies of eagles, hawks and owls.

Between kids, work, and a territory that was a long ways off, she stopped volunteering for them a while back.  Now we have partnered up and taken a territory that didn't have an owner.  It's about 30 miles from Park City, but it is an area where I have already made numerous trips to doing my photography including the Sage Grouse.

We did a first trip to the territory yesterday, knowing that a lot of the hawks had migrated south, but hoping to find the nests before leaves on the trees make it almost impossible. We saw lots of nests and found the edges of our territory, but we need to do a more serious GPS mapping later this winter. The happy surprise was seeing three Bald Eagles.  I wouldn't have expected them for another month or two.

 This younger eagle flew right over us.

 As soon as I moved to get into a better position, this one flew off.  Bastard!

I think this work will be a lot of fun.  It will be nice to have someone along on my photo trips (no offense Jasper).  I also think that we will find lots of excellent subjects for photos.  I think hawks will be easy, but owls and falcons will be the best finds.

You probably won't hear any more about this until summer.

- Steve Joyce

Leftover Halloween

Got to like the sense of humor, unless of course you are his wife. I saw this in a tiny town while looking for hawks and eagles.

Steve Joyce

Document of the Blog

This is for those of you with a blog and perhaps a significant investment in its content.  I have always been a bit concerned about the day Google decides my blog doesn't need to exist any more.  I've been updating this blog for seven and a half years, and this is my 1289th post.  I didn't find a way to check, but I am guessing I've posted over 5,000 photos. It is a very convenient history of almost everything I have done and places I have gone.

Today I was looking for something else and stumbled across a tool that reads a blog (either Wordpress or Blogger) and creates a PDF of it.  Sort of an e-book of your blog.  I have looked at several of these in the past and they have always been really crappy in their format.  The one I found today was free (although I made a Paypal donation), extremely easy, and looks OK. I liked it enough to promote it to the readers of this blog.  Enjoy!




Turn your Blog into a PDF Book/Archive.

BlogBooker


Written by - Steve Joyce

Park City Halloween Dog Parade

The annual Park City Halloween Dog Parade is definitely one of my can't miss events. Unfortunately for Jasper, it is also the one time of the year we get to decorate the dog.  This year he went as a football player.

Our lovely dog walker, Julie, volunteers to tak Jasper so I can take photographs.  This becomes quite a challenge once we get into the crowd and a few people give him dog biscuits.  To Jasper, that means all people, people's hands, and pockets are potential suppliers.

These photos are in the order I ran across them.  Some are dogs and some are little kids.  Before they start the dog parade at 5:00, the kids get two hours of Trick or Treating at the stores on Main Street,

Just as a clarification, Park City's idea of a dog parade is quite humorous. There are thousands of people and hundreds of dogs on Main Street, and not the tiniest glimmer of coordination, direction, or a parade.  It is more of a poorly named block party with dogs and costumes.

We ran across our neighbor, Nurse Hannah.  She had done quite well on the candy gathering. Jasper loves Hannah, even without candy.

Hannah, with her parents Monty and Sally.  I would normally leave it to you to figure out which is which, but Monty is the one with the long hair, on the left.  Notice Sally's birthday present, a new Canon DSLR.  Someone to go shoot with!

Almost all of the kids were in costume and a lot of the adults dressed up. This was one of the numerous bizarre combinations of parent and child.

A very clever costume combining Lance Armstrong and Pinocchio.

My favorite dog costume was this incredible little ewok from Star Wars, escorted by Princess Leia.

Does he look like an ewok or what?

Our builder, Rob Schumacher and his dog Elvis.  Rob is the one in the hat.

Not sure what it was supposed to be, but this was one of the oddest looking dogs on the street.  I hope that it's normally not the color shown here, top or bottom.

The Sherlock Holmes costume was good.  I especially like it since he is almost on point.  It's almost like he is saying "the answer is over there!"

One of our April Mountain neighbors moved across town a few years ago.  She was dressed as a clown with completely matching dogs.  They looked great and the costumes were stylishly form fitting (versus Jasper's football helmet that either turned sideways or dropped down to cover his eyes).

And we end with my favorite little boy.  He was dressed as a fireman and his completely loving, tolerant dog was dressed as the fire engine.  The boy was enjoying the events, but you could tell it was complete sensory overload.  Dogs.  Costumes.  Dogs in costumes.  Thousands of people, walking every which way. If he was like every other kid, he was also on a sugar buzz.

Once again, this is in my top 5 for what makes Park City such a cool place to live.  Where else does 20-30% of a town's population come out for a dog parade?

Sandy in Maryland

My mom lives in Crownsville, Maryland in an area that is full of old oak, walnut, and hickory trees.  When the wind blows hard, trees or huge branches come down and crush the powerlines, all of which are above ground.  Mom seems to lose power for 3-7 days in almost every major event.

Sandy was actually nice to my mom.  Looking at Baltimore Gas and Electric's outage web page, 345,000 customers lost power.  By some miracle, my mom wasn't among them.  Yeah!

Credit to BG&E. On Wednesday afternoon, only 36 hours after the storm ripped through, they have repaired service for over 300,000 of those customers.  Pretty impressive!

An update:  Six hours later, now midnight in Maryland, and they are down to 20,000 customers left.

Dropbox for Sharing

We all have become addicted to our digital devices: PCs, tablets, smart phones...  One of the challenges is sharing information between people or between your own devices. I have a suggestion: Dropbox.  It's free and it's very simple.

• I have a PC, an iPad and an iPhone.  There isn't a ton of data that I really want available on all three, but the amount seems to be growing.  Documents. Letters. Photos.  All I have to do is drop a file in my Dropbox and it is suddenly available on all three devices. Change it from one and it changes at all three.
• Sharing things between people can be painful.  How many times have you had to send multiple emails because the photos you wanted to send were "too big"?  Ever had problems saving a photo that came to you in an email? Just put all the things you want to share in a Dropbox folder and then decide who you want to have access to it.  You can also allow others to put things in your shared folder.

I've been using it happily for over a year.  If you go to Dropbox's web site, you can sign up and get 2 GB  of storage for free. However, if you click my referral link here, you get a bonus extra 500 MB and I do too.

Halloween Party 2012

Julie and I got invited to a great Halloween party so we had to put some thought into our costumes. Julie suggested Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. As you can see, she got to be the wolf.

She got her face painted by the woman who does faces at Park City's Sunday Silly Market.  She added ears, a tail, leggings, gloves and a furry little sweater. 

Of course, that left me as the frightened and vulnerable Red. It's amazing how easy it is to find a "Plus Size" costume and size 13 womens shoes out on the Internet. Most people at the party found my hairy cleavage and furry legs a bit disconcerting.

This is Diane, the party's hostess.  She is loading up on the little test tube shots she was handing out to people as they arrived. She throws a GREAT party.

Jim Covaleski was in town on his way home from Seattle.  He managed to quickly find a costume and join in the fun.

From the left, Cindy and Jim Lea and Stephen and Alison Pierce.

Don't you hate it when you show up at a party and find yourself wearing the same dress as another woman?  What are the odds of this happening?  No, it was not planned.

Julie, Jim and the Benson's (Loris as Cat Woman and Bill as Iron Man).  Bill swears the ripped look is conditioning from his mountain biking.

There was a costume contest.  Mario, who I think was the Queen of England, got first and Julie got second.

I took this shot of Julie and gave her some more aggressive wolf eyes.

Halloween is definitely one of the best holidays of the year.  Everyone gets to go a bit wild if they want to.  The most notable trend for this year was pirates, lots of pirates.  I guess this makes sense.  You can't go around dressed as a witch or a wolf any other day of the year, but a pirate?  You can always be a pirate!

Moving from fall to winter

It was fun walking around with my camera, seeing the collection of interesting things that happen when fall and winter collide.  Our neighbors little scooter has probably seen one of it's last runs for the year.  Time to hibernate.

My favorite was a pair of pumpkins that someone left on the hilltop behind our house.  No idea why they were left where almost no one will see them.  It certainly leaves you with the thought of a cold, cold Halloween.

You get some snow, but you still have some warm weather.  This creates an incredible amount of ankle deep slush.

Meanwhile, some areas look like they have just jumped straight to winter.

You can see the slopes have a white coating, but only about 8 inches.  Not even enough to cover the grass, much less the rocks and logs.

Last night the temperatures dropped to 13 and today's high barely got to freezing.  That means that the ski resorts have their first opportunity to make snow, and make it they did. Looking around, it appears that Park City and Deer Valley were each running about 50 snow blowers.

The guard rail near Empire Pass was coated with frosting, carefully applied. You have to double-click on the image to see how smooth it was.

The road to Guardsman Pass never gets plowed and it will close for the winter sometime soon.  Today it was packed with snow and a bit slippery.  As I started up the hill to Big Cottonwood Canyon, I saw a pair of cars blocking the road.  Looks like there was a bit less traction than they were counting on.  I turned around and called it a day, slowly of course.

Powder Mountain, a small ski area an hour north of here, ended up with a three day snowfall total of 42".  That's HUGE for October.  Actually, that's huge any month. Now it looks like we will give fall one last chance.

Jasper helps shovel snow

If you have followed my blog, you have probably seen Jasper jumping for joy while chasing the snow from the snow blower. Another of his happiest moments is sitting below the deck when we shovel snow.  Julie was up above doing the shoveling and I was down with him.

I'm not sure why he likes attacking the snow, but he goes at it with great energy.

We had 6 or 8 inches from this snow, so each shovel load pushed off is substantial.

He jumps up to try and meet the snow half way, chomping as much of it as possible.

And every once in a while, the snow "wins" and kicks his butt. Thankfully he lands in the soft snow. I caught this picture just before he landed with a thud.

Yesterday was a more scenic and restful day.  We only had an inch or two and it was already melting a bit.  For that, he just wanted someone to throw his Frisbee.

As he approaches nine years old, I am still amazed at how snow is such a great motivator and energizer.  When it snows, I can't find a better word than "joyous".