Do skunks celebrate Valentine’s Day? Sure, they’re very scent-imental!
Holy moley… the sky has opened up and H2O is coming down in buckets. My divining rod goes into retirement this very day…all I have to do it point in any direction and there is water! No more walking around the yard with the Y-shaped twig humming to myself…gonna miss those days…so will the neighbors.
I sit here, peering into the back yard and everything is sopping wet with rain dropping like someone is using a fire hose! This reminds me of how is was in the 1950’s when we had several weeks of rain every year. Maybe the Good Lord has decided to show us what the 1950’s was like? Back to “normal”.
More importantly however is that it is VALENTINES DAY. Cards, chocolate, dinner, celebration of love…that’s what I am talking about!
Random Memories: Here’s the truth… I met and fell in love with Sue in 1974 while working in the Avionics Development Laboratory onn the Space Shuttle Program for Rockwell International but alas, both of us were married so nothing happened…we didn’t even talk!
Ratchet forward to 1984… ten years later and we met again while at Rockwell…we were both searching for a life and it was again love at first sight…again! It was obviously meant to be! We joined hands in 1988 and love has never stopped, only increased in amazing ways!
So…today we stay in as it is coming down cats and dogs! The cement pond is almost to an overflow condition. Mid-morning I did a walk-about to see if anything needed to be fixed as we are going to have two days of rain. All was OK although the lime tree seemed to be dropping some of its fruit.
The remainder of the morning I sat in the office doing paperwork and watching the cats and dogs doing their thing! The rain was hard at times but not for a long duration. We did not plan to go anywhere so we didn’t care.
Daughter Michele came over and dropped off some home made cookies and we talked for an hour. We all have the gift-of-gab! I gave her a demo of Alexa but she was worried about it “listening in” to conversations. I think I may have convinced her…Greg “called in” while she was here and we talked for a while.
Did You Know? Alexa’s attention span, the buffer for how long Alexa stores what has been said, is only a few seconds, just long enough for the wake words (Alexa, Computer, Echo, or Amazon) that users can set. Nothing is saved on the device itself. It’s like recording on a tiny loop of analog tape: Every few seconds, the tape is rewritten.
Every Echo is loaded with four separate algorithms, each trained to listen for one of the four wake words. Once you set a wake word, that specific algorithm is activated, meaning your Echo can truly only understand one word. Only when the ring of lights around the top of an Alexa device is illuminated is the device recording and sending the audio to Amazon’s servers.
If you’re still paranoid, you can also check to see what Alexa has heard by opening the Alexa app, which contains a complete history of every utterance the associated device has ever stored.
We were planning to go to the Phoenix Club Valentine’s Day dinner-dance but alas, Sue was not up to it so we cancelled at the last minute. We will miss the gang but we must do what we must do! I was bummed out but on the bright side…we are staying warm inside.
It has rained and been cold all day and I saw this picture posted on Facebook…we were there two weeks ago! The Grapevine dressed in white…amazing. I am glad we are not driving it today!
So, we stayed home tonight and watching TV… Oh well…we tried! We did “tookies” and crashed… tomorrow looks like more rain but not the entire day. If it rains more I am going to make apple strudel again!
