Friday fun

It is Friday and Fridays are for fun. Today is the first day of March. March is always an interesting month in Minnesota. We might have spring weather in March or we could have winter weather. This year we didn’t have much of a winter.

With the warmer weather, it might be tempting to put the snow shovels away. Putting snow shovels away in March almost guarantees a large snowstorm. I am going to leave the shovels out and keep the snow blower gassed up and ready to go. Please do not put your snow shovels away.

Here is a picture I took last Tuesday:

The iris are popping up and the lilac bushes have leaf buds.

Enjoy the weekend and be sure to get outside. Keep the snow shovels handy and remember that only you can prevent forest fires.

It is Friday and Fridays are for fun.

This one is my all-time favorite fortune from a fortune cookie: “The fortune you seek is in another cookie” That kind of sums up my life.  Nice to see that even the people who make fortune cookies have a sense of humor.

Warm weather this weekend will melt the snow. Temperatures will be in the 50s and 60s next week. Nothing like a little late April weather in February.

It is Friday and Fridays are for fun. I was cleaning out my office supply cabinet and found these pins. They are lapel pins and I rarely wear anything with a lapel.

For those of us who are self-employed, there is no retirement party. There isn’t a gold watch or a cake either. That is alright because I am not sure retirement is even a thing anymore.

Maybe I could set a goal for myself. Three more pins and I retire. 🙂 LOL

The oldest pins are pins with backs to hold them in place. The newest pins aren’t pins at all. They are held on with magnets. I am sure I have some more of these but I don’t know where they are.

Maybe I’ll take a better picture of these and build a page on the internet to show them off, or I could just leave them where I found them.

 

It is Friday and Fridays are for fun. AI (Artificial Intelligence) has taken the real estate industry by storm. In fact, some say that real estate agents who do not take advantage of AI will soon be out of business.

Yesterday I was playing with generating images using Image Creator from Designer. It is a Microsoft product.

I wanted to generate an image of a “woman warrior on a mountain at sunrise”. When I saw the images of women who were in their twenties and shaped like Barbie, I decided to ask for an image of an older woman. I got several images of men with long hair.

Older women are invisible, especially on the internet. Computer programming is a male-dominated profession and so is photography.  The end result is that AI generates images that appeal to men.

Here is one of the images I got when I asked that my character be an older woman. Notice I didn’t ask for an old woman, just an older woman.

When I asked for an old woman dancing, I got an image that was a little closer to reality.

In general, AI takes the biases we already have and doubles down on them. There is something to be said for original content. Especially original art, photography, and writing created by older women.

It is Friday and Fridays are for fun. It doesn’t matter if the rodent sees his shadow or not. Here in Minnesota, we have 1o weeks of winter left no matter what,

and sometimes it snows in May. The picture was taken in mid-April and we had one heck of a storm 10 weeks after Groundhog Day.  This winter is so mild that I am not sure why we are even calling it winter but I think I wrote about that already.

 

It is Friday and Fridays are for fun. Yes we endured a week of cold that ended this week but this hasn’t been a real January. Sure there is such a thing as a January thaw but not weeks of day-time high temperatures above freezing.

Temperatures will soar into the upper 40s and lower 50s next week. That isn’t what January is all about and PLEASE stay off the ice on the lakes if there is any.

Here is a picture I took in January of 2023 of my back yard.

It seems like all I did that January was clear snow. No I don’t miss it but this winter is kind of freaky.