Sunday, September 6: Welcome back to my patio for our last official cocktail hour of the summer. I’m so happy to see you! Tomorrow is Labor Day, which always marks the end of summer in the USA. This year it’s the latest it can be because Labor Day is on the first Monday in September, which often falls before the 7th.
I don’t know about you, but I for one am happy to see summer come to an end. Virginia summers are so humid and miserable, that I am anticipating having fall arrive with its cool and dry breezes and its glorious fall colors.
Would you care for a glass of chilled white wine, or would you prefer some red wine or a cold beer? I still have some Bud Light Lime, which Mike, and many of you, think of as a sissy beer, but Mike has several types of craft beer: New Belgium Fat Tire and Starr Hill Brewery Jomo Vienna-Style Lager. I’m not a fan of the heavier beers, but if you are, I have some to offer. I hope you’ll make yourself comfortable and stay awhile.
Please, do tell me all about your week. Have you been enjoying your holidays? Have you done any interesting garden or house projects? Have you seen any good movies or read any good books? Have you been swimming or bicycling or hiking in the woods? Are you teachers out there gearing up for a new school year? Have you had any fun gatherings with friends?
As you can see from the pictures in this post, Mike and I took a long walk one late afternoon at Meadowlark Gardens. I always like to go through the gardens at least once during every season. You’ll see Mike in some of his silly poses, but you won’t see much of me because I rarely like pictures of myself these days.
I’ve been busy this week preparing for my CELTA course, which is now only two weeks away. I’ve had a lot of work to do in preparation for that, so I’ll be happy when it’s all over on October 16, just in time for my birthday. We’ve arranged to go to Chincoteague, Virginia on my birthday weekend, so I’m really looking forward to celebrating my big milestone and the end of that course.
I’ve been having a lot of problems with my MacBook Pro lately. It’s been running very slowly, most likely due to the over 75,000 pictures I have on it. Mike knew of a friend of my son Adam’s who is good at cleaning up computers, so this friend, Zak, came on Monday. He took my computer and when he brought it back on Wednesday, he had removed my 1TB hard drive, installed a Kingston 240GB Solid State Drive and transferred all my pictures to my Seagate external drive. I wanted him to show me how to access the photos on the external drive and when he opened it, he proudly showed me 7,500 pictures. I said, in horror, “I shouldn’t have 7,500 pictures. I have 75 THOUSAND pictures! I took over 6,000 pictures just in Myanmar alone!” After much assurance that the pictures were not lost, he took the computer back to his house to find them, along with all the albums I’d created on my Photos Library.
That evening, he brought the computer back and all seemed to be restored properly. However, while I was using the pictures, I was suddenly unable to edit them and then the whole Library reverted back to the 7,500 pictures. It took me a while to get Zak to respond, but when he did, he was able to link the 75,000 pictures to my library remotely.
The next day, as I tried to post pictures to my blog, again my Photos Library didn’t have any of my albums, and it only had the 7,500 pictures! This time, Zak was very unresponsive. Heck, if you’re going to have a business where you’re working with customers transferring data and changing hard drives, etc. you need to be responsive!!! Immediately!! This concerns a person’s beloved DATA, things they hold valuable for whatever reasons.
Needless to say, I lost a lot of sleep over this whole process, thinking my photos were gone forever!! Can you imagine how I felt? It was horrible.
On Friday, I went to the Apple Store and looked into buying a new desktop. It would be nicer to be able to work with my photos on a desktop rather than a laptop, and I wanted to have another place to have my photos. I guess I need to look into iCloud storage or Google storage or something as well. I ended up buying a desktop at MicroCenter and having them do the data transfer from my old 1TB hard drive. I will pick up the new computer on Wednesday or Thursday of this coming week.
Other than working on my course preparation and dealing with my computer, I didn’t do much of interest on this last week of summer. I did go to see the movie Mistress America one afternoon; I felt the best parts of that movie were in the trailer. I can’t say I enjoyed it that much. I really look forward to seeing Learning to Drive, with Patricia Clarkson.
Our walk at Meadowlark was quite a humid one, and we headed back drenched in sweat.
The highlight of my week was going to The 9th Annual Lake Anne Jazz Festival with our friends Karen and Michael on Saturday evening. We got to listen to several good bands while having wine and dinner at Kalypso’s Sports Tavern. It was so much fun, and we even got to dance, something I haven’t done in ages.
I’m so glad you joined me for cocktail hour this Sunday night. Hugs to you all and I hope you’ll come back in a couple of weeks to enjoy some of the cooler breezes of fall. 🙂
nomad, interrupted 