Today we got to stay home, with no errands to run. Technically, we should have done a dump run, but that can wait until things warm up a bit.
We actually reached a high of -19C/-2F, with a “real feel” of -15C/5F, which was nice for a change. Even when we did have wind chills of -25C/-13F, it was from a direction we were sheltered from. It was also bright and sunny, so we took advantage of it to run the house out the storm door window and do several loads of laundry. We didn’t get it all done before the hose had to be brought back in before it froze, even though we now do laundry using warm or hot water. We used to only do cold water washes, but this way, there’s less chance of the hose freezing. We are back under an extreme cold warning, and tomorrow the high will be lower than today, but it should be okay to run the hose out again for more laundry. We have extra bedding to do, after a cat threw up on my daughters bed. *sigh*
Speaking of cats…
I caught a photo of this bunch, all huddled together, this morning, when it was still pretty brutal out there. The sun room was significantly warmer, but from what I could see on the critter cam, they weren’t really using it. When I first came out this morning, though, I found a bunch of them cuddled together in the cat cage, under the platform. The platform hides most of the cat cage from the camera’s view, so I never saw them in there. I would be able to see if they jump in and out of the opening, though.
As I was going in and out today, to make sure the hose from the laundry was fully drained, I saw a crowd of cats mashed together in the top of the isolation shelter. I couldn’t get close for a photo, though, as the more feral ones would panic and run out of the shelter. I’m also seeing several faces peering at me through the cat house window, so at least a few of them are using that to keep warm, too.
In between such mundane household tasks, I have been working to free up storage space here on the blog. I really don’t want to move to another platform, if I can avoid it, but we simply can’t afford WordPress’ prices for extra storage. After trying a number of things, I ended up simply deleting old posts. For a very long time, I was doing Photo of the Day posts, every day, as well as Critter of the Day posts – sometimes both in one day. A lot of these were just a single photo with a brief comment on them. Others had several photos or slideshows, also with brief comments.
A few of them were also full blog posts. Those ones, I kept. The rest, I have been slowly going through. WordPress made changes in their system since I last did this, that has made it easier for me to find the posts in the first place (you’d be amazed how many unrelated posts would show up when I used the search term “photo of the day”, which was part of the titles), and work with them. It’s also been easier to find the related images in the media tab. So I’ve been going through the list of posts, opening to view the posts, one at a time, so I wouldn’t lose track. Once the post was open, I’d open the image (or images) in another tab, so I could copy and past the file name from the URL. I had the media storage in another tab, and I’d do a search for the image. Then it was, delete the image, delete the post, close the extra tabs, then do it again.
It was a real trip through memory lane, doing this. These were mostly photos of deer and birds, but also yard cats. Some of them were adopted out, some are now indoors, and a few have either passed away, or have disappeared. While I have all of these images stored on external hard drives, I did end up saving a few onto my computer and sharing the memories with the family. Seeing old photos of tiny Dave and little Cheddar, snuggling with Fenrir – who was still bigger than them at the time – was rather heartwarming. David was not fluffy yet, and both of them are at least double Fenrir’s size now!
The frustrating thing about this is, I’d gone through these posts before, back when we first realized that posting full size, high resolution photos on the blog was not a good idea! I’d gone through and resized those huge images, or got rid of them entirely, depending on what sort of post they were in.
When it came to our photo of the day posts, though, had I started cropping and resizing all of them, even adding borders and the blog’s URL onto them. These images do not have large file sizes. That’s why I left them, even as I’d deleted others with much larger file size images. There are just so many of them!
Which means that I’ve deleted dozens of photos and old posts, and have only managed to get my storage to 98.4% full, instead of 99.2%. That 99.2% was more of an “accident”. Thanks to 53old’s suggestion, I found that WP’s photo editor now allows images to be scaled down. I could use that to resize the images, and could even see how much smaller the file size was, as a result. Very hand, quick and easy!
Yet, the percentage of used up storage space went up, not down!
It seems that WP changed this function at some point, from a one and done sort of thing, to being able to revert the image back to original size later on. Which means that, while the scaled down image might be faster loading when the page is opened, the full size file was still stored within the system. So instead of just resizing a photo, I was essentially turning one file into two files, with the full size file “hidden” from view, but still in the system – and taking up storage space.
I went back to the ones I’d scaled down this morning and reverted them to their original sized, and got back the space.
So in order to reclaim more storage space on this blog, I’m going to have to keep plugging away at these old posts. They don’t get any views anymore; I’m currently working on 2019, so they’re all older. But gosh, I put a lot of work into those images, and I was posting them because I wanted to share some really nice photos!
It’s awfully tedious, but still preferable to moving the entire blog to a new platform. I will still have to store new photos somewhere else, like on Instagram, to embed them into posts. Thanks to a suggestion, I might be able to store them somewhere else and embed them into my posts so that people not on Instagram won’t have problems seeing them. I’ll look into doing that later on, though, after I’ve freed up a bit more space here. I need to have at least a bit more wiggle room in there!
I guess that’s my project for the weekend. The temperatures will be dropping; the extreme cold warning is back and continuing for a couple more days. We don’t have any appointments until the 20th, and it’s supposed to start warming up again around the 18th, so that should work out. About the only thing we’ll need to go out for between now and then is to get the mail and make a trip into town for little things, like refilling our water jugs. Possibly a grocery shopping trip for my mother as well. No big trips to the city or anything like that until the end of the month.
Next winter, I want to really work on finding ways to NOT have a lot of appointments in January and February. There isn’t anything we can do about stuff like my mother suddenly going to the ER and staying in the hospital for 2 weeks, but we can try to book medical appointments – for humans or felines! – outside of the two coldest, most miserable months of the year!
Of course, I’ve been saying that pretty much since our first two winters out here, where we found ourselves actually unable to go anywhere at all, either because the vehicles froze, or we were snowed in.
It hasn’t really worked out that way but, for all my whining, at least the winters have not been as bad since then! There is at least that, and replacing the van with our current truck, to be thankful for!
I’ll take what I can get!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 