Sidetracked Charley

  Winter really never came, but also seems to not want to go away. We got all the ugly parts of winter: high winds, snow squalls, subzero nights. And very little or none of the pretty parts: the angel soft snows, the fairy frost on the trees, the silence of a gentle blanket of powder. We got the spring breakers who would rather be at the beach, and the families who found the snow not nice enough, and the prices too high. My vacation rental, on its first winter, had good attendance but most seemed happy to not ski, but thrilled with the hawks soaring over the fields and hills, and the birth of two new calves behind my property. But not a good March for me. I developed a horrible case of inn keeper's thumb (skiers' thumb with a vengeance) which had my left hand and wrist not merely totally useless but terribly painful. Not only could I not use that hand but could not sleep and barely dress myself. As if sensing my disconnect my Microsoft Windows 10 computer failed. That was...

Heading Out   My last Microsoft ten computer crashed. I still have my laptop and I have been surviving with it while I made up my mind about trying an iMac. And figuring out whether I wanted to transfer all my old photo files once again from the cloud to McMac. Meanwhile I casually asked the local computer guy if he could just copy the hard drive to an external one and he did. It was then I remembered the trunk of photos in my mother's basement. Of all her age relatives she was the one with the space for storing the family's history. And it was there my sister and I discovered the trunk after Mom's death. It was too heavy to lift and locked. We managed to pick that and found it full to the brim of Kodak black and white prints of complete strangers. My mother once had photo books she had carefully arranged photos in. Attaching them with those cute corners you licked in exactly the right place to slip the image into. And she would use a white or silver ink to label under each...

Making a selection among many   Test day. Testing hand on repetitive motions like typing. Testing iMac on what of my routine computer things I can do without more software. All while considering how important is it to have all my cloud data downloaded to McMac or an external hard drive. Since 2010 when my computer, in the care of a recommended nerd, had its drive completely wiped, and the external hard drive failed. I have been obsessed about not losing photos or documents. Memories and also inventory as I am a photographer and a painter. Insecure about my backups I have subscribed to an cloud service. And when my beloved HP Windows 7 failed I transferred its brain to my Acer Windows 10. It took days. And since then I have taken important to me things and put them on jump drives. I knew I had 30 days from the crash of MS10 on the Acer to transfer files to a replacement computer. I discovered there are a lot of them on my HP Laptop. And with the increased capacity of scan discs none...