If not one thing, then another: Now my Microsoft Movie Maker app doesn’t work! And I had a brain fart when I came home from my little trip (about which later…) that resulted in movies, not photos of the boys greeting me at the door.
When I tried to [Screen Print] them, I ran into the next tragedy: The Windows 10 (may the creators all go “blank” themselves!) version of Screen Print is an abomination that, as far as I can tell, is unworkable — or, at least, doesn’t work in any recognizable way. I tried to screen print from the videos, like I did for the heading of this blog.
DO NOT DOWNLOAD WINDOWS 10!
So, that covered, and we can go onto today’s blog: Black Beauty and I took a trip up to Smith Lake in the Nebraska Sandhills and back. (Black Beauty is my new VW Golf Sportwagen. Yes, “Sportwagen” is spelled correctly as that’s the German for, well “Sport Wagon”.) We had fun!
East of Alliance ~ Wyoming coal in 100 car trains on the BNSF Railroad line.
Alliance is a major hub for these trains.
Nebraska Highway 2 east of Alliance is straight as an arrow till you hit the Sandhills.
Lakeside, Nebraska is a splotch in the road, though it has a few people and businesses. There’s a US Post Office there, for example.
Lakeside, Nebraska is beside a lake! Duh!
Classic Sandhills landscape… The sun was blotted out by the clouds in most of this photo – there’s going to be a huge storm tonight!
Lots of cattle raised on the grassy Sandhills. That’s the best and most typical use of the region.
Wet meadows in the Sandhills are inches above the Ogallala aquifer. It’s like walking on a green marshmallow to walk on a wet meadow! Lots of fun!
The first irritation of the trip: A long delay because of road work. Historically, the area was virtually treeless. Now, well, more trees, but not that many.
Everything I photographed from this point on turned out to be video instead. Note above: Microsoft Movie Maker doesn’t work on my computer any longer! So, you don’t get to see Smith Lake or the turtle that was walking on the road that I filmed. Of course, I was equally bummed out that the cute way Andy and Dougy greeted me was video, as mentioned above. They do it every time, so I will try to makes photos of it sometime soon.
“Blank” WordPress, too! I’m tired of all these improvements that screw up perfectly workable programs: Editing on WordPress is a tedious process because of little quirks like autosave on drafts that save nothing! The old editing program worked just fine. The new one…!
Technology is great. Except when it isn’t. 🙂 The boys don’t get to travel?
Exactly! Today I can’t get the site to bring up videos except as links. Any other day, it would work simply by pasting the URL on the draft page. No idea why today it doesn’t work. And I’m in no mood for it!!!
Some days I think it knows just which buttons to push to irritate us the most.
LOL@ Exactly!
I had forgotten how beautiful Nebraska can be. Thanks for sharing those photos.
You are welcome! I came back after my army years because I always loved the state and found it beautiful in subtle ways.
Your photographs are so beautiful! I absolutely feel like I drive across Nebraska by myself 🙂
Whatever ‘improvements’ WordPress makes, they all end up being hated by users. I guess that only their developers love them.
Thanks! If you ever do that, take Nebraska Highway 2 across the Sandhills. The best time is May-June if you want green and flowers because that’s the rainy season here. After you hit Alliance, at the end of Highway 2, switch to US Highway 385 North or South. South takes you to the Oregon Trail, Scotts Bluff, Chimney Rock, and other Oregon Trail landmarks. North takes you to Chadron (Museum of the Fur Trade), Crawford (Ft. Robinson, where Crazy Horse was killed), then the Black Hills of South Dakota (Mt. Rushmore, Custer State Park -“Dances With Wolves” territory -, the mammoth dig at Hot Springs and much more).
Oh this all sounds like music to my ears 🙂 My daughter and her husband
had been in Nebraska during their
cross-country road trip to New York and back to Utah in 2009. It was some adventure! History, literature and beautiful scenery mixed together.
It’s got lots of little and big museums, too, in virtually every town in the area. The Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Knight Museum and Sandhills Center in Alliance, and the Sallows Military Museum, and each has charms and a lot to do with local history or regional. There’s a visitor center at Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff National Monument, Agate Springs Fossil Bed, the mammoth site, and Carhenge (outside of Alliance). Ft. Robinson (Crawford) has a couple museums and regular summertime features like a playhouse, a stagecoach ride, buffalo burgers at the lodge, and so on.
Sorry to hear about the update troubles, Doug. On the bright side, you have some very beautiful country there in Nebraska. I’ve only driven through Nebraska in late July, early August when it was very hot and dry. Looks pretty in spring!
Yes, it looks burnt out after the raining season, but there is a subtle beauty to this region even then. Specifically, because the ground water is so close to the top, there are little oasises all over the Sandhills where water supports greenery.
Oh man! So much silly stuff happening! !!
It continues!
I’ve hung onto (for dear life) an old link to WordPress to create and edit new posts. Like you, I sure don’t find the new way at all user friendly. Even the stats aren’t as meaningful as before.
I have the original link, too, and, like you, create and edit through it. There is a problem, though, of ending up on the new crap edit page if you preview after saving a draft. I end up backing out and going back to the old edit page using the original link. The time wasted is an irritation, and, if you aren’t careful on the new edit page, you save a blank draft. Of course, you can pull up an earlier draft easily enough on the old edit page, and I do that regularly because of this quirk of the new edit page saving a blank on me.
Remember the good old days on WordPress when you could actually get help from the “Happiness Engineers”? Those days are long gone.
Yea, i used them a time or two, and was pleased for their timely help!
Amen to all the tech complaints. At least you are on a WP blog, theme developers forget all about the platform the theme is supposed work on and I wind up writing a bunch of code
u
Oh dear! I would go ballistic!
I enjoyed all the photos you were able to get. I am so glad I didn’t dowwnload version 10- I don’t like change so I have avoided it. Good luck with everything.
Windows 10 will go down as Apple’s best advertisement and reason for going Mac!
Great scenic and after windows hate-err eight-we changed to apple. hope you are able to get things straighten out and find you lost stuff on your computer.
Interestingly enough, before I read your comment, Ruth, I predicted Windows 10 would send the Microsoft faithful over to Mac! Windows 8 was nowhere as vile a mess as Windows 10, though I didn’t like it either. Vista was acceptable, XP was just fine, and I used it at work for a long time with no issues.
I was good with them all up through xp and 8 did it for me. I hot apple early and love it. Don’t even own android phone or tablet anymore-all apple.
It looks like a winner to go that way.
Thanks a lot for your helpful advice. I am getting pestered all the time to take what seems increasingly to be a fairly due product!
If my bitter experience helped, good! I hope some positive outcome can come of it.
I get that. I have a few of their glitches that can’t be fixed un fixed except by buying another computer.
I was contemplating that possibility this morning while doing whatever it was that somehow restores function to my laptop, if not my PC. One thing that came up was the reality I’d end up with a Windows 10 OS on a new PC. Macs are expensive, there are no Apple stores nearby, but that alternative increasingly looks like a reasonable option, no matter the cost or length of trip necessary to purchase one!
So, did you resolve it?
It seems to be fixed on both PC and laptop, though the means was retro.
Can’t leave with them and can’t live without them.
For sure!
Entertaining at home.
LOL!
That is the best kind.
Yeah, I think so, too1