2020 Life Logs, Day 318: Yard Work with Ollie
Date: Saturday, November 14, 2020
Weather: Rainy and Cooler; High 51, Low 32 Degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, Falmouth, MA
The rain ended, but it was a cool morning. Ollie, my youngest grandson, wanted to come over to help me with yard work today. I pay him by the hour and I get my money’s worth with him. He is only eight-tears-old, but he is strong and a very careful and hard worker. By 11 am, it was dry enough to get started. Most of the oak leaves fell from the trees during the past few days, adding to an already thick layer of a variety of other leaves. With this many leaves on the ground, it feels a bit like walking in water to wade through them. Ollie mowed and I emptied the mower leaf bag. Or sometimes, he raked and used the leaf blower while I mowed. Both of us worked as fast and hard as we could for over an hour and then the battery on the lawn mower needed recharged. So, we took a break for 30 minutes and then worked for another hour and half. I wanted to get Heather and Jed’s lawn mower back to them so they could use it this afternoon, so when we were ‘close enough’ to being finished, we ate a late lunch while the batteries charged again. Then took Ollie and the lawn mower home, along with my leaf blower. When we arrived, Heather was literally knee deep in oak leaves. She was raking and I don’t think I have ever seen so many oak leaves in one small area. I can dump mine down in the woods beside the cottage, but they have no place to dump theirs. They are making a huge pile and hope they can find someone to come pick them up.
I returned home and went for a walk with Shadow. I had been working outside all day with just a long-sleeve shirt on, but it was now past mid-afternoon and the temperature was dropping fast. My phone said it was 47 degrees F, but I was freezing. I put on my light winter coat, a hat, and gloves, and then went for a walk. It is supposed to get down to 32 tonight, but it should be back in the fifties tomorrow.
I spent my evening dealing with an issue with my recent photos. For my two big outings with the kids this week, the afternoon at The Knob and the trip to Plimoth Patuxent with Ollie, I took loads of photos using my phone rather than my camera. And then I spent a great deal of time editing and naming the photos. My Google phone is supposed to have a really high quality camera, but when I made the photo book for Ollie on Thursday, every time I added a photo I got a warning that the photo quality was not acceptable. In the end, the photos worked out okay for the book, but I mentioned this to Heather and Jed. They suggested that maybe I had used the wrong method of importing the photos. The photos were all still on my phone, which means they were also still in Google Photos online. When I checked, sure enough, the photos were extremely high quality on my phone and in Google Photos, but much reduced on my computer. So, I had to go back and download all of them again, which also meant renaming and re-editing the newly imported photos. I think I understand what I did wrong and hope not to repeat that again!
