I could not wait for The Husband to get out of bed Sunday morning to check his phone for trail cam footage of the critter we're trying to trap. This camera is so weird. It has WIFI, but in order to see the pictures on a phone, you have to use a wrist-watch-looking thing that somehow patches the phone to the camera. I have not bothered to learn how to do it, so I went out to see if there was anything in the trap.
The trap had been moved, and fresh holes had been dug around it, but the digger had not gone in. Nevertheless, I was excited at the prospect of finally identifying the culprit. Surely the trail cam had caught the goings-on, because the digger had been there for a while, digging all those holes.
As soon as The Husband got out of bed, we checked his phone for pics/videos.
I don't get it. There were videos of us setting up the trap, and one of us taking the SD card out of the camera the next morning, but nothing in between.
The Husband said, "We have a ghost varmint."
For some reason that escapes me at this moment, I wanted to take the SD card out of the camera and examine its contents on my laptop. I ended up accidentally deleting ALL of the files on the card. All of them. Probably a couple of years' worth of pictures.
Once upon a time, I knew enough about computers and MS-DOS to have undeleted the pictures, if pictures can be undeleted from an SD card (the internet says it's possible). So I spent about an hour trying to undelete the pictures from the DOS prompt. No luck.
I wasn't wildly upset about having deleted the pictures, even though they documented some pretty important events, like birthdays and weddings. The thing is that if I go to the trouble of getting out my camera to photograph an event (versus using my phone camera), I usually transfer them to my laptop right away because I want to see how they turned out. The good ones I copy to my hard drive right away. Still, the fact that I had not been able to undelete the pictures perturbed me. I like to do what I set out to do.
Eventually, I paid for an app that promised results. $75+, tax and all. And it basically was doing the same thing I was trying to do from the DOS prompt.
It didn't work.
It might have worked if I had been willing to spring for the "premium" version, but I wasn't willing.
So we put the card - the now empty card - back in the camera.
Before I deleted the pictures, I had noticed that the date/time stamp was wrong and mentioned it to The Husband. While I was trying to undelete the pictures, he fiddled with the buttons on the camera and fixed the settings. Some time around noon yesterday, he strapped the camera back in place and re-set the trap.
The camera took pictures and 30-second videos from then until this morning. HUNDREDS of them. And although the camera was still going at it when I went outside to check the trap (it caught me in my nightgown), it failed to produce a video of the crazy out-of-nowhere storm that hit yesterday about 7 p.m. and downed a tree in the "way back" section of our yard. And during the night, the only images it captured were bugs flying past. No sight of the critter.
I'm beginning to think he's smart enough to delete the pictures of himself. :-\
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