Ordering something online from a US retailer last Friday, for domestic delivery. I was given the option to pay $20 for “Next Day Air”. When I selected that option, the expected delivery date was updated to.... Tuesday, four days hence.

Folks in America know nothing other than this shady date math... an order placed on Friday doesn't get processed or shipped until Monday, so “next day” isn't until Tuesday, but it drives me crazy. In Japan, when you order something for the next day, it arrives The Next Day.

For example, in Japan, “Amazon Prime” is “free next-day delivery”. If you order something on Saturday night, you'll get it on Sunday. Sometimes you get things the same day... I've ordered something Sunday morning and had it delivered that evening. This is what I'm used to, so the American-style fake “next day” stuff is difficult to stomach. First World Problems, I guess.

Of course, my product didn't arrive yesterday as promised.

I got an email early on Monday from the shipper (Karma Mobility) that my package had shipped, but tracking didn't actually show up on the UPS site until 8pm that night, when it was “Order Processed; Ready for UPS”. That, I assume, was too late to make that evening's flight from California out east, which I further assume was why early on Tuesday morning UPS updated the status with the deliciously-vague “Due to operating conditions, your package may be delayed.” The next 17 hours went by without an update, until yesterday evening the package did make the flight out east, a day late, and so now they're suggesting that I'll get it today.

It seems apparent that it's the shipper's fault for missing the promised delivery date, so I sent them a note last night asking them to refund my $20. We'll see. Sigh.

This post is a continuation of “Snowy Ohio Morning, Take 2”, of photos around my folks' place after a snowstorm. After 49½ years at the same place, it's probably the last winter they'll be here, so I thought I'd memorialize the place with some more photos, mostly for my siblings' and my own memory...

I still remember coming home from elementary school one day to find it in the driveway. He bought it when adding on to our house, but he still uses it 40 years later to clear snow from the driveway.

We all wished he would have painted “Tonka” onto the main arm.

Peter Barnes has left lovely comments on my blog for the better part of a decade, usually signing his name as “Peter from Wales”. His very first comment, in February 2007, about some flower or other I had happened to post a photo of really made an impact. Back then I had few readers and received few comments, so his lovely comment made me feel great, and gave me the idea that if I were to include more flora on my blog, I'd get more lovely comments. It's that one comment more than any other thing that opened my photographic eyes, because once I started actively looking for pretty flowers to shoot, I started seeing beauty and interest everywhere.

Thank you Peter.

In a recent email to my Mom about moss or birds or something, he joked that my blog had more cycling than plants recently, so when I went out after the snow storm, I made sure to take something “planty” just for Peter. 😉

I remember collecting dandelions in this field when I was three years old, from which my mom made wine and jam and jelly. Some of the wine is still in the basement, the bottles covered with a thick layer of dust. My brother Alan and I broke one out the other day. It was dated 1969. We expected it to be rancid vinegar, but it was excellent. It smelled heavenly. Dandelion wine does apparently have a particular taste that takes some getting used to, but by the third little sip I was into it. Yummy.

The half-empty bottle, still covered in dust, is waiting on the kitchen counter for other siblings to sample.

After coming in from three hours of shooting, I tried some bird shots. There's nothing photographically exciting, but I like the content...

Earlier posts with better bird pictures include:

• Goldfinches in a Light Snow
• Freezing Bird Movement with a Fast Shutter
• Fun Day of Snow Play
• Can’t Get Any Work Done With Birds on my Laptop

I'll be in Ohio for another two months, at least, and hope to get some better shots. I brought only one lens with me on this quickly-decided trip, though, and it's not really appropriate for this kind of shot. I guess fate is telling me that I need to buy another lens or three. 😉

Another issue I discovered with my iPhone today, besides the problem of it not alerting to a new watchOS version, is that restoring an iPhone from a backup with iTunes requires a lot of temporary disk space, and if you don't have enough, the restore operation will partially fail, silently leaving the phone with some apps (and their data) missing.

If you notice, as I did today because most of my apps were missing, you can clear out disk space and re-run the restore.

The first time I encountered this kind of problem was a few months ago when restoring Anthony's phone. At the time I didn't know what caused the apps to go missing, and he was crushed to lose almost all his data.

At least now I know how to prevent it in the first place.

This post is for the search engines, about how I remedied an issue with my Apple Watch, for folks who might have the same issues.

TL;DR version: if watch-enhanced apps are not even showing up in the iPhone “Apple Watch” app, check in that app to make sure that you have the latest watchOS version.

I stopped by the Apple Store in Akron Ohio the other day to have my iPhone's camera replaced because its stabilization had started to go crazy. As they fixed it for free under warranty, I lazily watched the in-store video advertisements and impulsively decided to buy an Apple Watch.

Since its release I've had absolutely no interest in getting an Apple Watch, and I don't even think they look very good (my taste in watches is more simple, classic, as evidenced here). But my mother recently had a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side — the reason for my extended visit to The States — and thought that maybe an Apple Watch, with its Siri voice commands, might be a useful tool for her in the future. So, I bought one to test with.

After my iPhone was fixed, Apple staff helped me pair it with my newly-purchased Apple Watch and do some basic setup. It was all fast and easy, and I was out the door without any of the angst and dismay of my previous visit.

The Problem: some Apple Watch Apps Just Don't Show Up

The iPhone includes a built-in “Apple Watch” app that contains a list of all of your watch-enhanced phone apps. For example, the Facebook Messenger phone app includes a component for the watch so that you can receive message notifications on the watch. It's within this “Apple Watch” phone app that you configure which apps you actually do want to appear on your watch.

The problem I ran into is that some watch-enhanced apps simply didn't show up in the “Apple Watch” phone app. For example, Facebook's “Messenger” app did not show up.

Searching on the intertubes brought no end of talk about problems with apps not showing up on the watch itself, but nothing about my problem, about apps not even showing up in the phone “Apple Watch” app's list.

I had the latest versions of OSX and iTunes, and no amount of resets and full restores solved anything.

The problem, it turns out after many red herrings, is that the watch's software (watchOS) was old at version 1, and nothing alerted me to the fact that the watch I just bought didn't include the major watchOS version 2 update released four months ago. I'd have thought that somewhere along the line — Apple Staff helping me set it up the watch, iOS, iTunes, the watch itself, etc. — would have let me know that there was an update available.

As it was, with the old software, any phone app that targeted the new watch version would simply be invisible to the watch and the phone's “Apple Watch” app.

Inside the “Apple Watch” app on my phone, I went to “General > Software Update” (which had no notification icon). It did a check and lo and behold there was indeed an update. I launched it, and an hour later the phone displayed... drum-roll please... “watchOS 1.0.1 / Your software is up to date.”

Uh, I was supposed to have been installing watch0S 2.1.

It turns out that even though the phone was done doing the update, the watch itself wasn't quite done. A while later I could confirm that indeed the watch was at watchOS 2.1.

Now, all the watch-enabled apps do appear in the phone's “Apple Watch” app list. Woo-hoo!

Today was a gorgeous warm sunny day, with temperatures in the mid 60s (~18°C) and a warm breeze. T-Shirt weather. It's difficult to believe that just a few days ago we had lots of snow and temperatures approaching -10°F (-23°C).

A week ago I posted “Snowy Frigid Ohio Morning”, with lots of snow pictures. A few days later a storm brought a bunch more snow, and I went out early for some more pictures, from which I posted “A Warmer Version of That “Warm” House Photo”. This post has some more shots from after that second storm.

Early before sunrise, the light filtering through the clouds is decidedly blue/purple because it's lit only by the sky, which is very deep blue at that hour, and so the initial photos reflect that...

Once the sun comes up, the direct sunlight on top of the clouds filters through as a more true white, so for the rest of the photos I set the white balance to appropriately.

Continued here...