Organizing and catching up
Our lives have continued to be full of organizational and catch-up issues. While I wrote blogs and culled our photos for the photo albums, Chelsea set up our Traveling Roses Facebook page and put photos in our blogs.
I squeezed in time to work on deleting programs, photos, and music from my laptop, hoping to improve the functioning before calling in James. Then I tackled learning more about my Droid 3 and QuickOffice.
For many months now I’ve used the QuickOffice app on my Droid to take notes when I’m in the field. That part worked well, in fact I love having it, but when I transferred the documents to my laptop I ran into some snags. That took some looking around on my phone and consulting with Chelsea before I finally discovered it wasn’t my failure to understand, it was the limitations of the app.
I’m happy to report that I solved the phone-to-computer transfers of photos and documents, I know where to find everything on the phone (I’ve discovered all the little hiding places), and now I know my limits for what I can expect instead of being frustrated. That’s a very good thing.
Chelsea also spent time on cleaning up our database for sending out our first newsletters, which will be very soon, and we both have spent time catching up on the backlog of writing emails. We still have quite a ways to go on that project. I’m afraid it’s a “slowly but surely” project.
Another “slowly but surely” project we are slowly but surely tackling is organizing the phenomenal amount of data on our portable external hard drives. We have hundreds of movies, thousands of songs, and multiple thousands of photos.
Not only do we have to set up a logical system for finding the data, but we have to weed out duplicates and figure out a system for saving new data to the new system. It’s tough when we have two of us working and two laptops and two external hard drives.
Small miracles
Perhaps it’s the universe’s sense of humor, or a heavenly reward for getting through those tough last weeks in South Carolina, but any number of seriously annoying things suddenly starting resolving themselves recently.
My Droid 3 keyboard mysteriously started working after weeks and weeks of having the keys intermittently stick, causing errors in my typing.
With no changes, no recent efforts to fix it, no updates, no nothing, suddenly I am able to upload photos to Picasa online, directly from my laptop, for the first time in four years. Yes, four years of hassles and workarounds is mysteriously and suddenly over!
Several months before we left Delray Beach, Chelsea was carrying our six hundred fifty gigabyte Toshiba portable external hard drive when it slipped out of her arms and landed on our terrazzo floor. She immediately plugged it in and got all the data off it, but ever since we have not been able to save any data to it.
Those things are not cheap, so we brought it with us, not quite sure what to do, yet unwilling to just throw it away. A week ago, in yet another of my frequent we-are-cleaning-this-out moods, I grabbed the Toshiba and plugged it in. I’m sure you’ve already guessed the result. Yep. It’s working perfectly.
As if that weren’t enough, my laptop battery life – it’s still the original battery from eight years and thousands of tough travel miles ago – had gone down to about three minutes before I needed to plug it in. Again, with no special action or changes, I logged on one day and my battery suddenly lasted an hour and a half (and continues to last that long).
I’m still not done!
We’ve been missing our old buddy Fred Campbell from Abbeville, the one from all our unbelievable ultralight aircraft adventures. We’d tried to get in touch with him over the last few years but the phone numbers we had didn’t work and the emails bounced.
Then one Friday afternoon Kenneth asked if we needed anything in Abbeville. He was headed out shortly for a few errands. He and Krisy stopped at the shoe store while we walked across the parking lot over to Wal-Mart on a beautiful sunny late afternoon.
Thinking of how many times Fred had taken us to that same Wal-Mart during our stay in Abbeville, I did a little happy-dance, threw my arms up in the air and said, “Okay universe, we need you to produce Fred for us, since we can’t find him!” Chelsea and I both laughed and continued on into the store.
If you guessed that we ran into Fred, you’d be right. As we perused the peanut butter shelves looking for our favorite Maranatha almond butter (successfully, I might add), I glanced up and who was fifteen feet down the same aisle but Fred!
The reunion was quite joyful.
I swear these things are true. How could I even make all that up? All I can say is, bring me more, universe! I like this kind of story!