Hanging With Sweetie

Saturday is Hanging With Sweetie Day for me throughout the dirt track race season. Sweetie is my in-law's dog and very well named. She apparently thinks that my name consists of a series of mysterious letters that involve smacking your lips repeatedly.

Today was dirt track racing Saturday so I was home alone. Except for Sweetie, my in-law's dog. This year that means I have access to both computers at the same time. So I was logged onto my MSN software on the PC, making myself available for IM with my family, listening to Air America and occasionally playing a game of Bejeweled 2.


On the laptop, I continued plugging away on preparing my files for backup. My eyes are about done for today. I'm not going to make the deadline I was aiming for. I do have everything except the AOL mail from the laptop ready to go though, so that is major. I spent most of today on that and am nowhere near done. Mostly I was working my way through the two folders of incoming and outgoing mail that had automatically been saved on the computer as they were opened or sent. I had never bothered to clean them out. there were over 2000 items. More than two-thirds of that were news letters, ads, and spam.


I started with these two folders this time because when working with the PC email, I had not discovered them until after I had dealt with all the mail in the individual family and friend and web admin folders. Then I discovered that some of the pieces of the 'conversations' that I had noticed were missing as I had copy/pasted them, and thought were lost forever because I had forgotten to save them to their folder, were available after all. But to find them I had to weed through thousands of non-relevant stuff which really distracted me. It also meant that, instead of having a single text file open as I zipped through a single 'conversation' in chronological order, I had to go back and forth between conversations and then hunt inside them for the right date stamp to see if the item had already been pasted and if not insert it. That made working through those two folders take longer than working through all fifteen or more of the other folders combined.


So this time I went through those two folders first, deleting the newsletters and junk and sending the family, friend and web admin stuff to their appropriate folders. This will mean there will be quite a bit of duplication but it will be easier to delete a duplicate as I work through a conversation in chronological order then to hunt for the missing pieces later.


Anyway. That is where my big project stands tonight, as we close in on midnight. I am going to get my Sunday Serenity post up and then get some sleep. I've worn out my eyes. The pictures for both this and Sunday's post were both taken by my father-in-law. I ran across them as I riffled through folders on the PC. These were kept in the Shared folder because they were in the screensaver slideshow.