I’m sorry to get out so late but I’got waylaid with pneumonia for New Year’s; I think that this is the second time in this ten year span and the third overall. I did post on that great day, but my last post was not published here but instead sent to my cousins, and like I everything I pen, took forever to get right. Too sick too notice, I forgot to cc this site, but I believe gmail still has it.
I have a lot of catchup to do.
Last year I had planned to go through the Bible starting where I had been reading privately and putting my voluminous notes together, here, for my assistance and whomever else could use them. I got as far as Judges 6 which I was honestly enjoying, but then as always ill health, roared its head and I spent the first five months with Pseudomembranous colitis and getting anything done was a struggle.
When I was finally good in May I was behind with the chickens, had no vegetables garden and a list of errands a mile or two high. Just as I began to catch up, relatives from Down Under decided to visit and that meant a lot more cleaning, straightening and patching things up for the Sydneysiders. The after of their visit left me exhausted. I was beginning to get back into the game in middle of October when I got another case of the flu, and then just as suddenly after that left, my cousin Chris died of lymphoma at 27.
Of course I was down again. After that most of Thanksgiving was depressing in ways I cannot exactly explain, the old depressing of not feeling anything just numb. I rallied for holiday but got knocked in the teeth when his Aunt ended in the hospital with my bugaboo : pneumothorax and pneumonia. Nothing shakes you up when you see yourself coming in another guise.
I decided to try another track and decided to read the classes I took with DailyOm.com thinking and writing and going through and not stopping until I knew why. Well that led to more reading, more writing and finally just as I felt I had it coming together BOOM — my main machine went down with hard drive disorders that ranged from lots of dust, a few bad connections (dust can do that), bad windows drives (from Windoze, that was fun sorting out), a miscellaneous Trojan or two that Malwarebytes.com had to kill more than once, a plethora of baked goods that SuperAntiSpyware seemed to find at every turn and just as I thought things were good, and I had gone through a real jungle of mishaps, a hard drive failure that not only wouldn’t let me boot but took out larges parts of the Windows registry.
It was not sounding anything like Christmas. I can honestly say, despite many years in the hardware-software industry, it is getting harder to detect hardware errors from software errors and harder still to fix them. The commercial says we don’t need to worry about what goes wrong if the backup is in place. Well, since we all know how Benghazi went down I can’t say I had much faith in that line of reasoning having already been burned by Carbonite several years back.
I was about to toss it all, when I found a utility from SysInternals that spotted the erroneous blocks & remapped them. That was good, but then MiniTool (I’ve tried them all and some do not work on 64 bit machines despite their claims, MiniTool has worked on all my Windoze machines flawlessly every time), had to remap all my partitions so this new ghetto which I called simply _Unallocated_ so nothing would or could go there again.
But still doing all that almost around the clock meant losing real time, i.e. things I would rather be doing, and with so much hardscape at stake, I wasn’t sure at points, what I had left would work or be of any value.
I kept Calm and carried on.
Christmas was literally around the corner, it had originally felt like it taking forever to show up but now suddenly as the days shortened, was taking long strides to make up time, and sure enough right on schedule it arrived like the wonderful thing it is, and reminded me once again, what a nitwit I was and that I like the other fools on the planet borrow more trouble than we actually get. {I think I’m going to make that a personal motto.}
In short, Christmas was splendiferous.
It came right on cue. With Irving Berlin, orchestrating another holiday to remember, and creating another hit to sing, yelled to the crew, Stop work, you over there, don’t complain. Forget your troubles. Gather round, It’s Christmas…
And he was right. It was. And everything really is so much better live than on Memorex… if we just stop and enjoy it.
In my anguish... 