The summer heat continues, but
spiders spin their intricate webs,
hummingbirds urgently swarm porch feeders,
soon they depart on their perilous southern journey,
reds and oranges appear in the underbrush.
The shortening days signal the change that is coming,
and the spider lilies are blooming again.
I’ve had a Flickr Pro account for several years now, and I’m glad to read this announcement this afternoon. In the last several months I’ve cleaned up my Flickr account and have started taking pictures with my good camera in my quest to become a better photographer. I’ve been uploading my better pictures to my Flickr account, which you can view here.
“SAN FRANCISCO — Flickr has been snapped up by Silicon Valley photo-sharing and storage company SmugMug, USA TODAY has learned.
SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA TODAY he’s committed to breathing new life into the faded social networking pioneer, which hosted photos and lively interactions long before it became trendy.
SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, will maintain Flickr as a standalone community of amateur and professional photographers and give the long neglected service the focus and resources it deserves, MacAskill said in an exclusive interview.”
read more here: SmugMug snaps up Flickr photo service from Verizon’s Oath
I have a dear friend who had mesh implant surgery about 5 years ago, it hasn’t gone well for her. She has regretted her decision and for the last year or so she’s been hounded by one of these law firms to join in their class action lawsuit.
At the time she mentioned that to me, I was suspicious. Generally, lawyers that actively seek out people for class action lawsuits are not necessarily looking out for the plaintiffs…instead they are looking to pad their own pockets with their share of any damages they are able to recover.
After reading this article, I sure hope my friend doesn’t follow through with any lawyer-assisted reversal of her mesh surgery.
“Jerri Plummer was at home in Arkansas, watching television with her three children, when a stranger called to warn that her life was in danger.
The caller identified herself only as Yolanda. She told Ms. Plummer that the vaginal mesh implant supporting her bladder was defective and needed to be removed. If Ms. Plummer didn’t act quickly, the caller urged, she might die.
Ms. Plummer, 49, didn’t ask many questions. Her implant was causing her discomfort, and she was impressed by how much Yolanda knew about her medical history. She was scared. “It was like I had a ticking time bomb inside of me,” she said. Yolanda assured Ms. Plummer that all her expenses would be covered and that she would be set up with a lawyer to help her sue the mesh manufacturer, Boston Scientific.
Days later, court records show, Ms. Plummer was lying on an operating table in a medical office in a shopping mall in Orlando, Fla.”
Continue reading article at The New York Times
Here are some pictures Mark took of the yard over the weekend…..We planted those azalea bushes about 25 years ago, and, my, how they have grown!
If you are viewing this post in an email, click the title to see the original blog post that includes all of the photographs.
I think this sort of behavior has been commonplace with the entities that gained legitimate access to Facebook’s user data. I think we’re going to find out that this privacy violation is much larger and much deeper than we ever imagined it to be.
Data analytics firm CubeYou uses personality quizzes and apps clearly labeled for “non-profit academic research” to aid marketers in finding customers.
I’ve known a lot of people that have been taking some kind of anti-anxiety or depression drug for years. I’ve wondered what the plan was to get them off of the medication…this article seems to indicate there is no plan. . . their continued dependency is by design . . . JD
“Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/health/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac-cymbalta.html
For sure I saw 2 hummers, but there could have been more. One sat on the climbing hydrangea watching & waiting for the next zoom.
Boiled up several batches of juice and hung out 3 more feeders. Spring has arrived!
If you want to prepare your feeder, all you need to do is boil up some sugar water….It’s 1 part sugar to 4 parts water. I use some old Classico tomato sauce quart jars, which have 5 evenly spaced lines on the glass, so I fill up to the first line with sugar and then pour a little boiling water over it to melt the sugar. Then I fill the remainder of the jar with tap water, stir it up and it’s ready for the feeder.
