I mentioned earlier that all of the birds rather mysteriously disappeared the first week of November. They started coming back around Thanksgiving and have stayed. It might have to do with other people putting out winter feeders, and then going on holiday break. School starts back Monday. We'll see. Spotted so far: Tufted Titmouse, Mockingbird, Cardinal, Carolina Chickadee, Dark-eyed Junco, Pine Warbler, House Sparrow, House Finch, Bluebird, and little birds I can't ID, possibly Eastern Phoebe? All very common here. It was working just fine to simply pour seeds on the deck railing, until it started raining every day recently. Imagine freeze dried mealworms soaked in rain water. The seeds from Tractor Supply had a lot of millet, and that was always ignored. So I went to Walmart for some better bird seed and found a decent feeder with a roof, made of material like Trex decking. The plastic windows can be removed to make a platform feeder. I just tied it to the deck railing. The birds love this little thing, but it's too little. Several places have started making platform bird feeders that fit on a deck rail... LINK I'm tempted to try building one that extends longer down the railing, maybe up to 3 feet. Or I could just buy 3 or 4 more little feeders from Walmart and line them up in a row. That wouldn't be a challenge, but it would be a Plan B. Of course, 2 mourning doves eventually showed up. Soon there might be 4, then 8, then a whole flock. They come in and easily clean out 5 lbs of Black Oil Sunflower Seeds (BOSS) in a day. This new seed has some, but not a whole lot, of BOSS. That might help. I did find a way to make a feeder dove proof. Then the inevitable happened... Thanks in advance for not commenting on spotted windows. I forgot to clean them this time. . .
Back to the pc. I finally got the old one to start up, after many tries. The last two times this happened the dreaded Black Screen (with white letters) flashed before I could read it. Something about "BIOS", "didn't pass a test" and "Hit f1 or f2". Then crashed. This time it continued on. YouTube troubleshooting. A slim chance its simple---like a weak or dead CMOS battery. This pc is 7 years old (I think). Or it could be the power supply, or the power button. Or it could be almost anything else. Two batteries for $6 at Walmart. It restarts fine. It's turning it completely off that is the problem. I don't want to risk turning it off again just to check this battery. Will wait until it happens again and hope I don't misplace those batteries by then. lol I think I made a mistake on this new pc but it was not expensive. It has a sluggish response. The old pc is much faster. Old pc has 8 Gb ram. New pc has 12GB ram, but much less available space to store files. Will study the other stuff later and see what is the limiting factor. I don't understand it well enough to spend time right now.
Check to see what programs are in Startup. There may be a lot of built-in junk loading and hogging memory that you have no need for.
Task manager/Startup: I couldn't recognize anything using a lot of "whatever" that didn't look necessary. I'd have to hook it back to the ethernet to make a fair comparison. Maybe the sluggishness is only then. Both use Edge. Processor: Old (Dell Inspiron 3847): Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4170 CPU @ 3.70GHz 3.70 GHz New(Dell Inspiron 3670): Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz 2.81 GHz This bothers me (properties of C: drive) I transferred 50 GB of personal files to the new pc already. Old: 758 GB free of 916 GB New: 116 GB free of 221 GB
I now have 61 granny squares. Every time I get a few new ones, I stack them up in a pile and carry them around the house, looking for a place they will fit. They take up much less space than the skeins of yarn did.
Pet snail being fed a mealworm I didn't know those things sticking out of their heads were retractable.
I'm up to 68 now. As I mentioned before, the granny squares will take up less space than the skeins of yard did, so I figure I'm ahead, even if I quit. But I'm not quitting. Just can't make up my mind what to do with them. I think I need 4 more. Or maybe 8. And there are 4 that are ugly, so maybe 4 more to replace those. Just you wait and see.
I'm up to 74 squares. Will choose 4 x 10 = 40 and hook them together today. This will be tedious. The card table is coming out in front of the TV. Otherwise things are back to normal. 1. A new bird showed up at the feeder this morning. It got into a fight with the squirrel. The squirrel won. 2. Georgia will get beat by Alabama