It's Not The Heat...

[pshaw_raven]

Down the road, we have a neighbor working on some property he bought a few years back and is slowly building on as money allows. The family lives in Jacksonville, but he's originally from New York. Fox and I were both curious about what was being done, and Fox wandered around back there pretty extensively. I started to ... but left when I started noticing the trail cameras. Turns out the guy DID see us on his cameras, but when we spoke to him in person he was quite nice about the whole thing.

We'd come back from a run, and he was asking about biking in the area. Turns out he has a knee injury that prevents him running, so he bikes to keep in shape. He ran track in high school in upstate NY, and mentioned his track team used to do cross country runs from their school ... and the turnaround point was the front gate of Yoko Ono's farm.

I guess Yoko is upstate New York's six degrees of Dolly Parton. Where I'm from you are either related to the Partons, a good enough friend of the family to be allowed on their property (which is where my family fell, we used to go out there sometimes when I was really small and Mom says I spent most of my time chasing the Guinea fowl because I wanted to pet them), a general friend of the family, someone who watched Dolly perform early on Cas Walker's show, etc.

Anyway, this guy has decided that Fox and I are all right, because he occasionally texts Fox stills from his trail cams wanting to know who some of these people are. In a few cases we both had no clue, but one is a kid from next door who was probably out looking for his dog. The dog escapes at any given opportunity and I don't complain about it much here because it's a pug. Aside from being very unfortunate-looking it's not much of a bother. It looks like God took a normal dog and punched it in the face.

Oh man. It's already 71 out there. I need to go run. The humidity isn't too bad yet, but we're coming up on the worst of summer, when the lows at night barely get below 80. While it is a Suck-a-palooza out there, it's also kind of fun come autumn at RunDisney to listen to people from Up North complain about how hot it is, while Fox and I were just saying, "Wow, it got nice and cool this weekend! Only in the 60s? This is great." LOL

Comments

[oracne]

It's great you've got a friendly neighbor!

[pshaw_raven]

It is - I mean, most people out here actually are friendly, you just see a lot of "no trespassing" signs up because outsiders think they can come out here and illegally hunt.

[cdayzee]

It's a good thing your neighbor is understanding about y'all poking around on his property! Where I live it's the opposite & you'd be greeted with a gun. Not friendly folk at all. Also, you have to watch out when you see fence posts painted purple.

I legit want to put up trail cams on my mom's property so I can keep an eye on things but my husband is against it. I don't really know the first thing about how to install them, etc, so if you do, can you throw me some pointers? I may have to try to do it myself.

How interesting about Yoko Ono's farm. For some reason, I didn't picture her living on one.

I didn't know that about Dolly either but it doesn't surprise me. She seems still very down to earth. [allowing people on the property & extending general kindness]

[pshaw_raven]

He actually saw us out running several times and realized we lived nearby, so when we saw him out working on the fence we stopped to talk.

I'm not sure if it's state by state, but I haven't seen the purple paint around here in recent years. I'd heard the NRA trying to get laws passed saying it wasn't enough - putting the burden onto property owners rather than on random people toting guns. Our signs specifically mention no hunting, fishing, or trapping.

Trail cameras like the ones he has are not something I'm too familiar with. I think for most of them, the manufacturer has their own app, and the camera units connect to whatever networks they can find, and run on a couple of AA batteries. Around our house we have indoor and outdoor cameras that run on a Ubiquiti network, which is probably very different from the trail cameras. Ours run 24/7 and Fox has the system set up to store seven days of recordings at a time, but we have the option to save clips or still from them. Trail cameras typically have a motion sensor, so they're more like a "camera trap" that will only start recording if something moves into its field of view.

I only met Dolly once as an adult and she was incredibly nice. She's also really, really short. I mean, I'm 5'8" and was wearing flats, and she had on high heels and still just came to about my shoulder.

[cdayzee]

...and the camera units connect to whatever networks they can find,
That's what I was wondering & thinking I needed to have wifi at the house.
I'm also wondering how often the batteries would need to be replaced.

Thanks for the info!