A dog just stepped in front of me, so I will do my text-less picture post test and see if the picture posts

Sent from my iPhone

Update 2:42: This picture has now been up for an hour-and-eighteen minutes standing alone with no text. The test worked. Then I did a followup test with a red truck and no text. It worked, too. It posted the picture. So, along with the two accidental tests this morning, this is four posts in a row that contained only a picture and no text. I did this with the email workaround, then tried the truck again, with no text, using the iPhone app, and tried to post it as a draft. It didn't post anything. Not the picture, not even the title.

Squarespace is very strange. I think I will remove the red truck, because I like the dog(s) much better and want it to be at the top of the page for awhile - until I post my daily school bus.Here is what I wrote when I made the original dog Instagram, dictation typo corrected:

I am walking. ahead of me there is a dog in the road, blocking my path, trying to act tough. I am not afraid. I know it's kind. In the end, he will lower his tail and accept a pat upon his head.

The woman and the dog who were too far away for the iPhone photograph I wanted, part two: The dog is brilliant – suddenly they are too far away again

I stopped to chat with the woman and the dog. The dog was quite brilliant and claimed to have read every word Chaucer had ever written and recited a few lines from the Canterbury Tales to prove it. I then got distracted by Instagram for a few minutes and when I looked back towards the hill I saw that the woman and the dog had turned around and would soon be going back up it.

This presented a whole new photographic opportunity, but once again they were far enough away to just be tiny, indiscernible dots to the iPhone. I have made a lot of progress recovering from the minor injuries I suffered a while back but I still can't jog or run. Yet, I had to get close enough to get some kind of photograph before they reached the top of the hill. I discovered that if I kept my feet flat and kind of shuffled quickly the pain was minimal. So I shuffled as quickly as I could and just before it was too late and the silhouette of her head and shoulders blended into the shadows atop the hill, I got close enough to take this picture.

The woman and the dog who were too far away for the iPhone photograph I wanted, part one: too far away

I turned on to Wards Road and started walking towards the hill when I saw this woman and her dog coming down, nearing the bottom. It would've been a really neat photo had I have had my "real" camera and at least a small telephoto lens, but I have carried no camera but my iPhone since I returned home almost three weeks ago. It was beautiful, the way the shiny wet hill rose up behind to cast her and the dog in silhouette. To the iPhone, they were tiny, indiscernible dots on a thin glowing thread of silver running down from the hill. I feared that by the time the distance between us closed enough to render she and the dog discernible, the perspective would have changed and she would no longer be a silhouette against the road, the picture would no longer exist. Still I had to try. I shot this at what I knew would be the last possible moment, and then she took a couple of more steps and and the effect was completely gone.

We chuck all aside and go for a drive

Fall tends to be a very short season here, days such as this extremely rare. I have been taking a semi-vacation/recuperation break since my return. I decided "what the hell, I'm not going to let this day go completely to waste," so I grabbed Margie and Lynx and we headed out to take a nice drive on this beautiful fall day. We pulled off for a brief stop at this overview of King Mountain and the Matanuska River. This lady also pulled up with her dog. She got out to take a picture while the dog looked for a place to pee.

Got to get up early, so I'm going to bed early – wonder if I'll sleep?

I'm going to bed right after I make this post. For me, it is still early - at this moment 9:40 PM. But my plane leaves Anchorage at 6:10 AM, which means I need to leave here by 4 AM. And I need to take a shower before I go. So I'm going to bed. I probably will spend a lot of time lying awake, wondering why I bothered to even go to bed early. But I'm going to try anyway. I'm very tired, so maybe. I just hope Jim behaves himself and doesn't raise a ruckus tonight. He's usually pretty good at night and even helps me sleep, but every now and then, he raises a ruckus.

It was a rainy day today, and tonight is a rainy night. I could encounter my first subfreezing temperatures tomorrow. When last I checked, the temperature in Barrow was 32° F, or 0°C. The humidity was 89%. It snowed in Deadhorse today. When people try to belittle the cold of Alaska, they always like to say, "well your cold is a dry cold." Yes, our cold is a dry cold --- when it's bitter cold, because bitter cold air cannot hold moisture - but bitter cold is... bitter cold. But when it is just modestly cold, then it can be pretty darn humid, too.

We get it both ways.