HISTORY
Day: 04/30/2014
SOME LIKE IT HOT
Ring of Fire
Do you love hot and spicy foods or avoid them for fear of what tomorrow might bring?
Some like it hot. I like it a little hot. A little spicy. I know people who pride themselves on liking it so hot for me, it’s just pure pain.
But a little spice is nice, don’t you think? In food … and life!
DRIVE BY SHOOTING
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Flowers
Today we were in Boston. It was my surgery follow-up. He told me I’m doing fabulously and I look really great.
“You should see how other people look a month after surgery!” I can just imagine.
I graciously accepted the compliment then asked when I would feel as good I look.
“It takes a few months, you know. But you are doing really well.”
Drive by shooting along the Charles River
That was the medical part. The other part of the trip was spring. It wasn’t a pretty day. No sun. Chilly, only 45 degrees which is very cold for the end of April.
It was drizzling too. But along the Charles River, the cherry trees, magnolias and apple trees are blooming their hearts out. I grabbed a shot as we sped by. It goes to prove that Mother Nature. against all odds, is bringing springtime.
There’s nowhere to stop to take a picture on Storrow Drive, so this is officially a drive-by shooting! Along the Charles, at the very end of April 2014.
BACK IT ALL UP!
I was just reminded of something. I go long periods and don’t think about it, but I shouldn’t, and neither should you. By “you” I mean absolutely everyone. Whatever you do — write, take pictures, or whatever — if you do it on a computer, back it up. I learned the hard way.
ILOVEYOU (aka Love Letter), was a computer worm that attacked tens of millions of PCs on and shortly after May 5, 2000. It showed up as an email message with the subject “ILOVEYOU” and an attachment: “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs”. The ‘VBS’ file extension was typically hidden by default on PCs back then. It wasn’t on my computer, but I worked on a development team on my computer at home — an early telecommuter — so it wasn’t unusual for me to get files full of code as part of my job.
It took a mere few seconds to destroy every single jpeg on my computer. That represented all of the photographs I had ever taken that I was storing on my hard drive, more than a decade of family and artistic pictures. It only took a few hours for a fix to be created and distributed, but it was too late for me.
I had been backing up to CDs, but I hadn’t backed up my photos, only financial records and my writing because that was work-related.
I lost hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs.
External hard drives existed, but they were uncommon and expensive — very expensive. Now, there’s no excuse. You can get a huge external hard drive for short money. I back up intermittently to my two external drives, but a make sure to move files between my laptop and my big desktop everyday, and I save things online too
Eventually, I have 3 or 4 copies of everything, not counting whatever I store online. I don’t feel it’s too much. You can’t have too many backups of things that are important.
Even if it doesn’t seem very important. it can suddenly become very important if you have lost it forever and can never replace it. Back everything up. If it’s important enough to save it on your hard drive, it’s important enough to back up.
You can, for example, get a 3 TB external Seagate drive from Amazon for $139 including shipping. One and two terabyte drives are less expensive. If you don’t like that, there are ample choices for every budget. Don’t make excuses. One day, something bad will happen. A hard drive dies on you. It happens. It has happened to me twice. The first time, it was a secondary hard drive and I got enough warning to get my stuff off the drive. The second time, a message in a black message box — I’ve never seen one like that before or since — appeared on my screen saying that there was a problem with my hard drive, back up now. By the time I finished reading the message, everything was gone.
But that time, everything was backed up. It was an inconvenience, not a catastrophe. I had learned my lesson.
You don’t have to learn the hard way. Back it up. All of it.
ITCH!!
For everything, there is a season. This is my season to itch.
First, you wake up from surgery in screaming agony and after a while, it subsides. Little by little, it goes from agony to misery. The misery lasts months, though if you analyze how you feel, you recognize under the pain layer, you’re feeling better.
Until the itching starts.
First, it’s a tickle. A couple of days later, the prickly feeling becomes a torrent of itching. Which you dare not scratch lest you open up one of your incisions.
I have seasonal dermatitis too. It kicks in every spring and fall. It’s not a disease, so there’s no cure and by itself it can cause frenzied itching. And hey, it’s spring, sort of. A bit cold and rainy, but according to the calendar, it is spring. So my dermatitis has clicked “on.” Add that to the healing incisions and it’s a perfect storm of sensation.
You can get drugs to dull pain. Sometimes you can get drugs to make pain go away entirely for a while.
Nothing makes itching stop.
It’s a sign of healing they say. Me? I hate it.
