Fitbit report #2

Well, it finally arrived today, "only" 11 days after ordering. As I said before, buyer beware. You want it fast? Pay for faster shipping or buy from some company that actually knows how to get a product shipped.


Setup: Hah. First of all, my desktop is ancient. I’m running XP. So yes, I get it that I can’t expect modern tech to work smoothly with my computer but excuse me, Fitbit, if you don’t want people who use ancient OS to try to set up an account, then don’t offer the download for said ancient OS.

I decided to set up the Fitbit account using my Google account info. Well, okay, that didn’t work. It says “Welcome back, Lif Strand” but then it asks for me to login and won’t accept the Google account info.

So I click on “Forgot your password?”, enter my email address for password recovery and guess what? “The email address you provided did not match a registered user account.”

Oh no, I’m not messing with this tonight. I already hate Fitbit and this is adding nails to the coffin. If I keep trying to deal with this stupid login issue tonight I’ll just have to throw the damn thing on the floor and smash it.

Wonder how many footsteps that counts for?

Fitbit report

Midnight blue!

Yes, I know Fitbits are just fancy pedometers with extra doo-dad capabilities, but so what. Any gadget that gets a person moving and helps a person become more aware of how much physical activity she’s really getting is a good gadget.

Plus I’m curious. My friends have Fitbits. I don’t generally succumb to the desire to have as many toys as the next friend, but darn. I know in a normal day I must take many more steps than they do.

I have a pedometer around here somewhere, but where? Am I even going to look?

No, because I have gone ahead and ordered a Fitbit.

I chose the El Cheapo model, the Fitbit Zip, no doubt called that because it doesn’t do much more than a pedometer does other than connect to the web and record footsteps. That's fine for me. I don’t really care to know how many calories it thinks I ate or used or whatever, nor do I need a device to tell me how poorly I sleep.

Besides, if I ever want to know those things and more, I can upgrade.

So I ordered my Fitbit Zip (in a chic Midnight Blue) from Fitbit itself on Jan 2. I ordered it with free shipping. Ten days ago. BIG MISTAKE.

I admit I’m awfully spoiled by Amazon. I’m a Prime member and Amazon processes orders and ships stuff faster than fast, so that even the slowest way of coming to me is only ever a few days.

But no.  I did not order from Amazon.  I ordered from Fitbit.  And I think Fitbit worked hard to find the absolute slowest way to ship so as to punish me for not paying extra for shipping.

Here it is ten days later and no Fitbit. Using the tracking number provided I see that not only is it still on its way, but now (for the third time) there’s another message that it’ll be a few more days.

I mean, really – could they find any way to ship slower?

My idea was to get the least expensive Fitbit, try it out, report about it here on my blog, and if I had a favorable report, I'd get the next level up, try it out, report about it, etc.

So my first post is this: TERRIBLE SHIPPING and disappointment and I haven't even tried my Fitbit out yet. And I haven't walked any more, either, because you know - I don't have my Fitbit yet so why walk?

Summary: Buyer beware. Get your Fitbit with free shipping from someplace other than Fitbit directly. Or don't be a cheapskate like me - pay the damn shipping fee. 

Miss Ogeny says...

If you mean "human", say "human".

Take that, you elk you!

I used to like elk a lot more than I do now. 

I've had no beef with them (so to speak) for 20 winters. They haven't bothered me much (we did have a brief battle over just who had rights to my apple trees, but that's done and over with) and so I leave them alone. I don't hunt them or eat them.

Not anymore. No more Ms. Nice Gal.

This winter for the first time a crowd of cow elk decided to hop over the 5' tall horse panel fencing that surrounds my compound and help themselves to the horse hay. Once they start that kind of a thing, they won't stop if there's any chance of even one more mouthful of the fruits of somebody else's labor. 

The culprits scouting out the crime scene
(photo taken in low light before sunrise, that's why so blurry)
(Oh, and the bent horse fence is from a tree falling on it, not from elk)

I don't have a hay barn. Ever since I got my first horse back in the mid-1970s I've lusted for a big barn with lots of hay storage, a barn I could park a truck in or a flatbed trailer if I wanted to get it out of the rain or snow. A place for horses to get out of extreme weather if they wanted.  Other gals might look longingly at ads for Manolo Blahnik strappy torture heels, but me, I lust for a barn. 

I guess I've been lucky all these years. The elk have never bothered the hay before. Sometimes I'd stack it and leave it without the tarp. I got spoiled, I guess.

Not any more, that's for sure. 

After the first raid on the hay, I became diligent about covering it at night.  But the elk just rooted under the bottom edges of the tarp even though I had liberally bungee corded it down.

Then I leaned wood pallets over the sides of the stack. The elk just knocked the pallets over or pushed them aside, whatever was easiest. In the process, they stomped on the pallets and broke a bunch of slats. The stack was at the end of the horse trailer, under the bull nose. Those blankety-blank elk had no problem walking underneath to get at the hay from that side, too.

The pallet in the lower right was tossed there by the elk.

When the toll on the hay got too high, I decided to get serious. I use the area under the bull nose to store things that I don't want getting wet (no barn for that, right?). I decided to block that space in, to give up on unloading the hay from the pickup (no sacrifice there), and instead to back the truck with the hay into the space between the horse trailer and the big utility truck that I've been meaning to get rid of for some time but never have since it's full of junk stuff I need to go through before rehoming.

Which I did. Back the truck up, I mean - certainly not go through the boxes and boxes in the truck. Why rush it? The boxes have been in there for 20 years, they can wait a little longer. So the next step was to block off access to the back of the pickup, to the underneath of the bull nose, and, well, to everywhere I could think of that an elk could sneak through.

It took me half a day to get it all set up, but last night the elk were unable to get into the hay. YAY! It's a trial for me to get to the hay, too, but oh well. 

The pickup backed in and blocked in.
Installment being inspected by Joe.

Pallets around the bull nose, tarp inside to discourage elk from reaching over

Entry to the fortress, blocked off at night of course.

Yes, yes, I know it's a hokey job. But it's temporary, okay? Any day now I'll get a barn.

A beautiful day

Life is about contrast. The light can't be appreciated if there is no dark. It's true in music, it's true in all art, it's true in life.

Joe in the snow  December 2015 Lif Strand

This morning we woke up to 3" of snow, a welcome sight in a dry year. We - my dog Joe and I - just had to go walking in the white stuff after feeding the horses. The sun broke through the clouds and made sparkles on the snow. The blue, blue sky was suddenly clear. Coyote and jackrabbit footprints broke the pristine surface. Birds scattered little plumes of white, fluffing their feathers as if they were enjoying a bath in a warm summer pool.

Joe was cheerful, even slightly goofy, as he can get when he's not "on duty" as a livestock guardian dog. He really enjoys our walks. He lags behind me, his attention diverted by some interesting smell, then barrels on by to get in front, because he seems to think that's where he should always be. He's always on the lookout, of course. He's never really off duty, not in his mind. But he allows a little fun to come into the job when we walk.

Joe deciding what to do about the neighbor's cows that have strayed onto his property
December 2015 Lif Strand  

Joe had surgery just a few days ago.  The vet removed two lumps on Monday and yesterday morning she called with the biopsy results: one lump was a perianal adenoma mass, removed with good margins. Joe is over ten years old. I never got him neutered even though I never bred him. However, hormones aggravate this type of cancer, so Joe was neutered when she removed the tumor. 95% of the time that's all it takes to ensure that kind of cancer doesn't come back.

However the other lump was a mastocytoma (mast cell tumor). It wouldn't have been discovered till much later if I hadn't seen the growth on his tail and brought him in.  The tumor was on a testicle, not visible but the vet discovered it when she examined him the week before. That's the good news, because it means there's a chance we caught it early even though it's a fast growing tumor. The bad news is that it's a mast cell tumor. It's not going away on its own.

So now the hard part comes. Without treatment the vet said Joe would have weeks to a few months to live and it wouldn't be pretty. With treatment there's a chance that Joe would not only get a longer life, but that it would be a better quality life. It's expensive, the drug. Of course it is. But it isn't chemotherapy, the side effects are usually not a big problem to deal with and it's quite effective in many cases.  No way to know if it will be in Joe's case of course, but....

But none of that is the hard part.

The hard part is knowing that Joe is a short-timer. My logical brain points out that he's a senior citizen now. He's got other health issues and his age alone means his time is limited.

My heart says no, no, no, never leave me Joe.

Joe on alert December 2015 Lif Strand

Joe, of course, knows nothing about biopsies and diagnoses and prognoses. He lives in the now.

We humans are the ones tortured by knowing what the future could bring. Joe is happy to do his job, to eat a meal, to go for a walk, to rest his head on my arm when I'm typing so maybe I will get up and get him a treat. But I wrestle with fear of what is to come.

When it gets bad it will be hard to remember the good times. But today is not then.

I owe it to Joe to not mess up his now with my fear of the future. My job isn't to deny what will come - that's just not possible for me anyway - but to allow the contrast between that knowing and the pleasure of what I still have today make this beautiful day all the more beautiful.

JK Rowling and music

I saw a clever meme today that said basically you can tell more about a person by their choice of music than you can by their race, religion or sexual preferences. That sounds pretty right on to me.

Career of Evil

I just finished reading JK Rowling's latest book, Career of Evil (Ms Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith).  She quotes Blue Öyster Cult throughout the book in chapter headings and, well, elsewhere in the book - and that's all I'm saying about that. You'll get no spoilers from me. At any rate, I figure that Ms Rowling must like the band.

I closed the book and thought about it a moment. I could't recall a single BÖC tune, even though Ms. Rowling provided a list of song references and permissions at the end that should have prompted even my faulty memory.

If you know anything about me, you know that my musical preferences run towards the instrumental, specifically that of the genius guitarist, Jimmy Page. I don't dislike lyrics, but lyric-heavy at the expense of musical development just doesn't make it for me. Over the years I've gotten more and more picky about it. Back in the day I listened to my share of Arlo Guthry and Bob Dylan, but what really called to my soul was the melodies, the riffs, the rhythms of the instruments - with voice as instrument, not as conveyor of language. 

Real music. Not poetry set to a tune.

So over time I indulged myself more and more until now days and weeks can go by with nothing but music that features Jimmy Page coming out of the speakers. Obviously this means I haven't even thought about, much less listened to, BÖC in years. I liked the book. I figured if JK Rowling likes the band that much I should give them a listen. I tried half a dozen songs on for size this evening.

Oh boy. I won't be listening to BÖC for another 40 years or so. Maybe I'll like them better then. Enough said.

So about that meme. What does Ms. Rowling's musical choice for the novel tell me about her?

Well, BÖC is an American band, for one thing, and that means Ms. Rowling is not stuck on British music. That's nice but not earth shattering. No, what jumps out at me after listening to the band and thinking about her inclusion of their work in the book is that JK Rowling likes Blue Öyster Cult for their lyrics, not their music. 

But you probably figured that out before I did. 

Still, its nice to know this new truth about JK Rowling.  It's not earth shattering but it tells me something important about her that I didn't know before: I probably wouldn't want to be stuck in a car with her on a long trip if we had to listen to her playlist.

About Cows

by Lif Strand (c) 1996, 2015

Until I made personal acquaintance with one, I never had anything against cows. I mean, aside from the nasty smell of dairy farms and feed lots - the memory of which I tend to push to the back of my head (especially when in grocery stores) - what’s to dislike about cows?

You see a few black and white bossies munching on green, grassy hillsides and you've got to smile. And who can resist the big Guernsey doe-eyes? As for the vast range land of the West, dotted with Herefords, Angus, or better yet, longhorns - why that’s practically an icon of our mighty country. 

So, until 1996, I thought cows were pretty much OK. Until then I might have even harbored a thought or two about fresh milk in the morning, home-grown steaks, a few calves out in the back 40. I had never had to deal with cows up close and personal, you see.

Then I met Fraulein.

It was our friend C's fault (initial only, to protect the guilty). Retired from ranching, widowed and bored, he’d been hanging out at the dude ranch where I was employed as head wrangler. This high-end management position entailed about 10 hours a day of scooping manure; feeding and grooming and tacking up the dude string; taking uncoordinated, unfit and complaining dude riders on one hour trail rides; and carrying plate scrapings and coffee grounds from the lodge to the chickens. What C found entertaining in all this escaped me, but he spent a lot of time hanging around, making unhelpful comments and generally getting in the way. 

One of his most unhelpful comments involved the superior qualities of ice cream made from fresh, unpasteurized, unhomonogized milk. This comment marked the beginning of the end of my heretofore pleasant and uneventful relationship with cows.

C’s parents had a milk cow when he and his siblings were growing up. Later, C’s wife also had one. While she was into making cheeses, C’s specialty with fresh, raw milk was butter, making it just the way he used to as a kid. C had fond memories of this butter making, and so - even though he himself did not drink milk, and even though he lived alone and thus consumed little butter - he decided it would be a great idea for him to own a milk cow. He also thought it would be a great idea for me to help him find this cow. Over my protestations of no cow husbandry or dairy experience, I found myself using up one of my rare days off for The Great Cow Hunt on the Rio Grande.

My vote for making a few exploratory phone calls first was quickly vetoed, so we headed east and north with no plan that C was willing to share. While we parked and moseyed up to the Lemitar Livestock Auction building, our first stop, I ventured to ask why C thought there’d be any dairy cows at this auction in the middle of beef country. I was informed that there were quite a few commercial dairy farms south of Albuquerque, their lush pastures irrigated by the muddy Rio Grande. C was sure that there’d not only be Jerseys or Guernseys, but they’d be good milk producing cows that would be in calf as well. It defied any logic I could come up with that any dairyman in his right mind would take such a beast to auction, but we were spared further discussion by the discovery that the one dairy cow at the auction had already been sold. I guess arriving 2 hours late for the auction hadn't been such a good idea, but the rickety old trailer C pulled behind his tiny Toyota pickup weaved whenever he drove faster than 35 mph.  The 125 mile drive from his place to the auction a wee bit longer than we’d planned, and hotter, too, because it turned out the air conditioner was broken. 

Never mind, we were in time for the auction's noon break, so we ate in the air-conditioned lunch room and moved on.

C’s newly revised plan involved driving further north to Belen, where he was sure he would find the dairy he’d sold his wife’s cow to 6 years prior. Barring success with that, he’d just stop at the first dairy farm we came to and pick up a cow. Four or five farms and several sweaty and miserable hours later, this approach did not seem like such a good one. If there’d been doors to slam in our faces, our noses would’ve been pretty flat. I was ready to call the whole thing a bust but C convinced me to stop at one more dairy farm, just north of Socorro. If there was no cow here for C he promised we’d get some dinner and go home. C perked up considerably as we pulled into the yard (coincidentally just across the freeway from the Lemitar Livestock Auction of many hours ago). He now recalled that this dairy was, in fact, the one where he’d sold his wife’s cow.

Although the owner apologized for not remembering that particular cow, he did miraculously agree to sell a cow to us. I was skeptical of the whole deal, especially when I saw what the cowman picked out. Like I said, I don’t have any cow experience, but somewhere in the dusty corridors of my memory I recalled that a milk cow should be broad in the pelvis, have 4 even sized udders and good feet. Josephine (the cowman swore that he knew the names of all 300 of his cows) was presented to C as an excellent choice.

She wasn’t exactly pedigreed, the cowman admitted, but it looked to him like she might have some Jersey and some Guernsey in her. He did not point out the thin and flabby udders, nor the small size of her bag, which was quite small compared to those grotesquely distended ones of all the other cows. If milk had ever been in those udders, it was a long time ago. It seemed to me that perhaps these were not good signs. But then Josephine proved to not be pregnant. She was rejected, in spite of her very good feet.

C agreed to the cowman’s second choice, Fraulein, who proved somewhat difficult to catch. I held back comment, wondering how C, with his bum ankle and one lung, was going to handle clever Fraulein in the future. As the temperature had not dropped from the mid 90s all day and I was overheated, short-tempered and hungry, I contented myself with hanging out in the shade of the milking barn while the two men took a great long time to work Fraulein towards an aisle leading to a cattle chute. Of course, I had to sympathize with Fraulein , because I could not imagine that the pregnancy checking process, involving a shoulder length plastic glove for the dairyman and much fecal matter on the part of the cow, was anything Fraulein was looking forward to.

An hour or so later, Fraulein was in the rickety trailer and we were on our way home. C was $75 poorer than he’d have been if he’d purchased Josephine. True, Fraulein anatomy was an improvement over Josephine's, but besides the fact that she was hard to catch there was no calf in her either. This was a minor point that C had tossed aside with a wave of his hand. He had also tossed aside a few questions of mine that I thought were quite pertinent, such as did C have a milking stanchion? (No.) A cow halter? (Why would he need one?) Milking buckets? (Pots from the kitchen worked fine.) What about the fact that Fraulein had never been hand milked before? (No problem). Hmmm.

It was much cooler when we got back to C's place, probably since it hadn’t been daylight for many hours. Miraculously the cow hadn’t suffered any physical damage from the trip even though the trailer had shed a few parts along the way as a consequence of her jumping around so much in the back. She was mightily miserable as we shooed her into a small pen next to C's barn, since she was well overdue for her afternoon milking.

I wondered how C was going to deal with this poor tempered beast in the dark (no electricity in the barn), but this wasn’t going to be a problem for him since since he was planning on heading straight to bed. I looked doubtfully at Fraulein's milk-engorged bag, listened to her groans, and recalled all the stories I’d read as a kid about having to milk that cow on time no matter whether or not Lassie was barking or Fury was whinnying about the danger coming down the road.

And then I made a fatal mistake. I said, brilliantly, I'd milk her myself. After all, I reasoned, how hard could it be? I’d seen it done on TV a zillion times. And I was sure I’d read about it in a book sometime or other.

I won't go into the gory details here. I did relieve some of the cow's discomfort but it wasn't pleasant for either of us. Just let me say that a cow that has only ever lived her life in a commercial dairy has no idea how to be a cow. She’s been milked by milking machine since day one. To put it bluntly, it toughens those teats right up. Fraulein had never had anything as soft as her own calf’s mouth sucking at her much less an inexperienced human hand weakly squeezing and yanking at her swollen and painful teats (only one hand because the other was occupied elsewise).

A cow’s way of expressing displeasure is first indicated by a thrashing tail, said tail generally also holding a quantity of manure like a brush holds paint. Cow manure is similar to paint, too, in that it is mostly liquid and it will color the object that it is applied to. I realized that evening that I much preferred the smell of paint to manure. I furthermore realized that holding a penlight in one’s mouth may lead to unwanted foreign objects entering the mouth. It’s not a memory I like to dwell on.

A cow’s next way of expressing displeasure is the use of her hind feet. You’ve no doubt heard the term cow-kick. A regular kick is one by the hind foot aimed backwards. A cow-kick is one that goes forward, perhaps with a bit of English to the side. It hurts when it connects with a human body part, say a hand that's holding a milk pail. When a cow cow-kicks the milk pail (or in this case, the old coffee percolator I stumbled across in the tack room) it is knocked over, spilling the contents. The loss of the few ounces of milk that had actually accumulated hardly mattered since nobody was going to drink milk that had dead bugs and cobwebs floating in it anyway. It did bother me to discover that milk turns out to be quite sticky when it soaks the knees of your jeans.

A third way a cow expresses displeasure is by leaving the scene. The rope I had looped over Fraulein's neck and fashioned into a crude halter was for roping and was therefore quite stiff. Thus it simply shook loose when Fraulein tossed her head. Even if it had stayed on, I couldn’t have prevented her from walking off, not without having the end of the rope tied securely to something like a freeway support piller. I only wonder why she didn’t do that first thing.

Did I mention cow drool? Did I neglect to note how cow piss splashes as it hits the ground? Never mind.

Here is the horror of it all: I escaped to the dude ranch and left C to the tender mercies of the cow. But then, after just a week or two, he drove up hauling the damn beast in his rickety trailer. He was donating Fraulein to the ranch, he said. The owner actually fell for it when C explained how the guests would enjoy fresh milk right out of the cow, how kids could learn how to milk, how he could demonstrate butter making. 

“But who will milk the cow every day?” the owner asked.

The two of them turned to me. 

“She can milk the cow,” C said, with a grin. “She’s good at it.”

And that, my friends, is why I don’t like cows.