Friends

 When longtime friends who haven't met yet get together IRL for the first time, the stories fly. They race across the table, collide in mid word, then burst like fireworks on high, each spark racing into another tale, then another, and yet another, until a web of magic floats over all, right there in McDonald's.

What joy! 

What amazement!

What sheer, unfettered delight!

And, yes what love...

We loved meeting you, Cathy and Keith!

We knew it would be a great event, all those years of building friendship over the miles that separated us could not have been wrong about us all. We were sure to like each other.

However, it turned out it was so much more than we could possibly have anticipated. Ohio turns out the most wonderful people.

I hope you pass this way again and thank you for taking time out of your journey to share an hour of sparkling stories and heartfelt smiles. I am so glad you liked our river.

Hugs to you both. ( How nice it was to share real ones, and so very heartfelt.)

Comments Revisited

If you are a Blogger blogger, you no doubt noticed that after a recent update that you no longer receive email notifications of comments on your blog. If like me you want to answer all your comments to keep the conversation moving this was a big pain in the neck.

Yesterday a friend I "met" through blogging, who is much more conversant with computer technology than I, sent me  a walk through that will get those notifications turned back on.

I followed the directions and it works fine, so thanks Ruth for the great information! Now if I fail to reply to your comments you can give me heck if you want to....I no longer have an excuse. You could even do it in the comments section....

It's Working!

Thank you to all you dear, sweet people who helped me in my attempt to deal with Site Meter's recent failure. Just minutes before I opened the template to send it to a friend to remove the feature completely, it began working again......so I guess we are in wait and see mode for now.

But thanks so much for being willing to help and for teaching me, via your comments, more than I previously knew about dealing with HTML and the template.

Expert Needed

My Site Meter hit counter ground to a painful halt last week and finally locked up at 209,702. It hasn't moved since last Tuesday. I have contacted the company repeatedly only to receive form letters with blah, blah, blah about migrating servers and it only lasting a few hours. Yeah, at least a couple few.

I am completely disgusted and am thinking about removing the code. However, I can't find it! I have scrolled and scrolled through the HTML code and just can't see it. 

I actually put it there many moons ago, but the new template is so different from those days. Anybody know how to get rid of it? Or should I just leave the dead counter sitting there in the side bar as a sort of a monument to years of your visits? I just don't know.

Meanwhile I installed Stat Counter, which is okay I guess....I am lousy at change and have had Site Meter for years.

Thanks in advance....

Counting

Speaking of miscounts, this little guy only has one antler

Can anybody help me with the reason for this? (Not the antler, the miscounts on this blog.) I enjoy watching the number of folks who visit Northview, what brings them here, and what they read. I have been noticing lately that the number of hits counted by Site Meter has dropped dramatically. However when I looked at the Google analysis of the site, not only is it showing MORE hits it is showing a LOT more hits.


For example this morning Site Meter is showing 26 and Blogger's internal counter is showing 149. Both sites are set to ignore my own visits. I am thinking of simply ditching SiteMeter. What do you think?


Hmmmm......

Word Verification

The topic of the day. Seems everyone hates it. I prefer not to bother with it myself, although I do type in those absurd letters when needed because spam comments are a hassle for me. I figure that they probably are for other blog authors as well. (I mean, I don't even HAVE one of those, so why would I want to extend it? And I wish I could help every Haitian orphan and I'm glad you passed my rhubarb leaf bird bath post on to your esteemed colleagues and all, but some things are just outside my frame of reference....)

However, this is about your enjoyment more than mine, and I hope you keep visiting and sharing your thoughts, so I shut the silly things off.....for a while at least....

No more alphabet soup, just type and enter .

That being said, I have sometimes saved the best ones that I have stumbled on, just because of the sheer serendipitous-ness of the words. Some of them seem too appropriate to be truly random.

Anyhow, have a good one. Your visits are valuable to me...especially the comments.

Dum da Dum Dum..Messing with the Template

Just checking to see if folks who have been having trouble accessing Northview can get on now. Over the past few days some people have been unable to get on at all, others have slow page loads and still others get a message about the Stumbleupon script running slowly.

And others, including myself and Liz, can get on just fine. Go figger.

Of course I contacted the folks responsible for that script. Of course they did not reply within the time frame promised and of course nothing I could find on the Net gave me the details on how to get rid of the darned thing.

So, I boldly went where I have never gone before and cleared all changes to the widget part of the code.

And would be most grateful if you let me know in the comments if it worked, if you are having problems, but can still get to the comments. Etc. Thanks

Blocked

For some reason some people are getting a message when they try to visit that Northview is private and invitation only ...and some are not. I don't know how to fix this...it is not set to private on the settings page, and of course I don't want it to be private. Y'all are very welcome here and pretty much make my day...every day.

Can anyone help?

Word Verification

I experimented with turning it off for a while. I know it is really a pain in the neck to try to read and type those twisted letters. Sadly within just a day or two spammers were aggressively hitting my old posts and driving me crazy.

So, I turned it back on. Sorry for the annoyance it may cause.

Cold Dawn

Bur cucumber skeleton....they are a nuisance like kudzu, but interesting just the same.

The colors are not so very unlike June...pink...gold...faded blue and a little green where the lawn grass grows or the pasture is nibbled short. All as if muted by distance, far away from the hot, red tongue of sun, which would light them up bright and strong if it was summer. Softened by frost, silenced by summer's end. Bird calls are thin but bright. No dawn chorus when I go out to the stove. Just the roosters crowing, a chickadee waking up in the hedgerow.....a far away cardinal chinking but not singing. Even the crows are absent, not a goose is stirring down on the river. It is about as peaceful as it ever gets during this soft prelude to the day time.

November has its moments.

The holiday has left us with a pile of bookwork and barn work and household choring for the day so here are some fine reads from my favorite bloggers.

First a happy birthday wish to one of my most favoritest blog friend....Cathy at Looking Up

My kind of poetry about winter, from Linda at Just Another Day on the Prairie.

More poetry about the season from my first ever blog friend, Rosemoon at Moonmeadow Farm

Because this is a dairy blog, a daily must read on dairy John Bunting's Dairy Journal

Just in case you think the weather is a challenge here, a bit about daily life in South Dakota. If you farm or ranch you have mornings like this....but that doesn't make them fun.

Plus a blimp

Your morning laughs, just to get your heart pumping.

Something different but beautiful.

And mice, but cute ones

And there you have it. Now off to the barn to see what mayhem the girls and boys have thought up for us in the night. (We hoped that when we shipped the steer from Hell that the whole broken water bowl/flooded mangers thing would be given a rest...not so much, alas.)

Llamas on the News

Our good friend Teri, llama llover and source of our favorite chickens has made the news!

Blogger's New Editor

So here I am trying to post some nice photos of cows and sunshine and orange trees and fuzzy grass...oh and some fat frogs too, when the new editing system for posting pops up. Lots of new options. Lots of new things to learn. Keeps changing fonts just for fun.  One of the slowest photo uploaders I have ever used. No way to upload multiple photos....oh yeah, I am in love. NOT.


I checked out the page where folks can comment on this topic and guess what...nobody else likes it either!

The Camera Came Today

From the contest.

I am so excited. Can't wait to get it charged up and take some video.

****A big thank you to NutriDense

MORE of this darned weather again tonight. The guys just got the last load of hay unloaded as it hit.

August 6 2005

The day the first post appeared here. It's been a great five years. Thanks for riding along and sharing via the comments!

Noticed

These stories might be of interest to North-viewers....I was thrilled to learn the results of Web Moo.O, an agricultural social media contest, (which I had incidentally forgotten that I entered) (although no one has contacted me yet). I discovered it through the stats on Site Meter and did some happy dancing etc.

Northview Diary is a lot of fun for me...I love getting to know all of you....and it is so nice that the folks at Nutridense liked it too.

Strange Things in the Stats

Don't you just love

I am sure most of us who use traffic meters see some pretty strange search terms now and then. I get a kick out of watching what lands folks here and sometimes wind up scratching (or shaking) my head (although I rarely get any that are as funny as the ones Jeffro gets.)

Anyhoo, now and then Googlebot shows up in the results ...maybe five or six times a week...and it is always interesting to see what sent it here....usually calf names and growing lettuce indoors and such. However, last night it stopped by and stayed....and stayed...and stayed.....for over an hour and a half. To the tune of thirty pages.

Photos that have

Anyone more knowledgeable than I who knows what's up with that?

And what are the funniest searches that bring folks to your neighborhood?

Nothing whatsoever to do with the actual post?
(Or maybe I found the Googlebot out on my porch
and grabbed pictures of its head, paws and fur....)

Cross Country Blogging

I meant to ask to take a proper picture,
but got so interested in talking that I forgot....

It is pretty cool when a fellow blogger rides a motor cycle across the USA and writes about his travels. Cooler still if he stops by for a visit. Today we got to meet Earl, and it was a fine experience. He is even more well-spoken than his blog would have you think, (which is saying quite a lot) and he didn't seem to mind the warts-and-all experience of visiting the wilds here. (And what with the lawn mower languishing by the honey locust, hood-deep in uncut grass and the usual general shagginess, there are warts and wilds aplenty amid the good parts.)

We toured the mostly empty barn, as the girls were out to pasture (any other day they would have been on the hill right behind the house but today they decided to wander way to the back.) We checked out the ag bagger and the self unloading wagon, which coughed up a beater yesterday, but is all fixed today. Then we walked about half way to the way back fields and stopped in the Thirty-Acre lot to look north toward the Adirondacks. NY was putting on a gentle show of fluffy white clouds and stark shadows against the green of the mountains (instead of the usual rain, rain and more rain) so the view was worth the walk.

We had a nice talk, and I got to satisfy my curiosity about the Appleseed Project, which is something Earl participates in regularly.

It is pretty neat to me how blog folks are on one hand complete strangers and on the other so familiar and friendly. Thank you Earl for taking time to stop and talk. Hope the rest of your trip is safe and beautiful.

Friends

While we while away the summer wishing for hay weather, and patching and repairing and bickering while we wait, some of our blog friends are doing exciting things.

Earl is at Yellowstone National Park

Joated is in Dawson Creek BC

Linda P shows some flooding in Canada...all I can say is wow!

Rev Paul talks about bear attacks and the biggest fish you could imagine, caught by someone you wouldn't expect.

Linda B has some amazing photos of her part of Colorado. Make sure you spend a few minutes checking out recent posts for ancient rock paintings. They are incredible. It must be amazing to live near them

Sandcastle Momma has an update on the oil spill that is simply heartbreaking. Why are these wonderful people and this beautiful place being hurt like this?

Lisa has new baby chicks.



JB has rainbows (and I am so very envious)

Dani has rainbows too. You really should compare.

Hope you enjoy their wonderful posts today, rather than having to read complaining about raining...

Hay Video Update

***This whole affair is an incredible story of the wonder that it is the Internet and the people who communicate on it.

Our Florida blog friend, Sandcastle Momma and her family are responsible for the video of oil being soaked up by hay, to which I linked last week, as did several other bloggers who were astonished by such a simple, yet effective idea.

Thanks to the efforts of the good folks involved the story gained enough attention and impressed so many that the concept is going to be actually used on the beaches there.

Click here to read an update on what is happening and here for more about the hay video itself.

Finding Friends in Far Places

I get great joy from writing Northview Diary and interacting with the people we have met through it. People have done us astonishing kindnesses that have truly changed our lives and shared our triumphs and tragedies. The world has so much more meaning when it is shared....

Now someone very sweet has sent me the loveliest gifts, a beautiful piece of her handiwork and some delightful seeds for summer gardening....(the cheerful cow is actually on a background of snowy white)

Thank you Dani, with all my heart!