Hello, yes, it’s been a while. I got busy then I got sick and then some other bad news I’ll get to in a minute.

While sick and up at 2am drinking more of my favorite tea.  I got to see the Christmas lights when I’d rather be sleeping. But there I was, so I grabbed my camera…

 

This Yogi Bedtime tea is really nice, I love the licorice in it.

 

 

I’m going to make something fun as soon as I’m over this cold! I think I’ll add tofu and maybe cream cheese.

 

 

Now for the bad news. I had a hard drive go bad with all of my old photos, photos that I like to know I have but don’t really look at or do much with but I like to know I CAN get them when ever I want.

It is my own fault, this hard drive used to go whop whop, when it ran and then sometime this fall it stopped going whop whop when it ran, I just thought it had cured it’s self and was running quietly.

I was wrong about the self curing over time.

Apparently that does not happen with hard drives. 

No, I did not have this drive backed up anywhere.

In the above photo is the test running on my good hard drive, I never used to read that white text, since I’ve started, I see it says “0 bad file…” That’s the good news.

When the test ran on the bad drive, the test said it took away numerous orphan files then it got to this stage and then said it encountered an error and could not complete.

So I called my computer healers and asked them to prepare healing poultices, ointments and a new patient room. They said Look lady, no promises and we’ll let you know if it has a pulse.

 

Oh.

 

 

I was able to salvage a couple of really low quality photo off of it before it stopped even making the “tick tick” noise.

This is a view from the hike up to Mount LeConte that I know for a fact that I could re-shoot and do 1000x better, but it’s not the quality, it’s the memory, this was the first time. Actually, I didn’t even take this photo.

 

 

Then this, Pond hockey. My brother didn't really care for hockey but was a good sport and went out on the ice with me.

Now that I live in the south, being able to say you played on an outdoor pond is such a big deal to the kids from here. Back then it meant shoveling first, trying to remember not to shovel the snow into your boots at the edge. Trying to con someone else into shoveling.

And then trying to not lose the last puck into the snow.

Good times.

 

 

Talk about photo quality! This is of my grand mother (on the left) and great grand mother.

This is scanned from a low quality 1 hr print 8x10”  that was scanned from a 5x7” print. 

This was 1940s –ish.  I bet they never went to Wal-Mart in their pajamas!

 

So if there is a lesson from today, I hope you will not wait for your hard drives to self heal.

Happy new year!

Good news, good news! My computer has been healed!

See that red thing? That’s the transplanted graphics card from some generous organ donor that knew it would no longer need it after it’s death. So that red card has been in cold storage, well more like a shoe box, yes that’s how they store them,  for months just waiting for someone like me who would need it.

I mentioned last week that my computer has some kind of severe health issues. Very bad issues, so bad that it seemed to be in a coma or something. I was beside myself. Yeah, two of me all upset. It was so bad I even declined the offer to shoot at a wedding because my computer was nearly dead and it just didn’t seem right to leave a sick computer home alone.

 

I went to see a computer healer.

 

He laid hands upon it and said “Why is your RAM loose in here?”

“Wha? My RAM? I don’t know, I did hear something go clunk when I put it in the car” I said.

 

He unplugged things.

 

He removed my graphics card and put in the red one from the organ donor.

 

He brought that “fan in a box'” and said lets make sure it’s not your power supply.

 

And it got up and went! Yay! Oh, wait was it the graphics card or the power supply?

 

Tried putting my graphics card back in and turning it on: Nothing!

 

Just then my brother called. This is Jake when he was 7 years old.  I use this picture on my caller ID for him it makes me smile when ever I see it.

You can always count on Jake to tell it like he sees it. Jake wanted the very latest on the diagnosis. I told him we had just determined it was a bad graphics card and my power supply is fine.

Jake cheerfully says

“That’s just a Band-Aid but it saves you from having to run down to Best buy and buying the one variety of dog food or cat food they have on the shelf. It’s much better to be able to go to Newegg and make your own cat food.“

 

 

That’s all for now I must go spec my own cat food.

 

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