A Near Disaster and Other Stuff

• So, I almost had a real disaster on my hands tonight. About 2 years ago more or less I got a little external hard drive and each month or so I would put my pictures for that month on it. Well, the little hard drive has been acting funny for a while now. I made a half hearted effort to get the pictures on the hard drive onto DVDs but ran into some problems and quit. Well, tonight the thing decided to totally die or at least fake its death. When I plugged it in one of those little windows popped up that says--"Scan and Fix" or "Continue Without Scanning." So, I always choose to continue but this time I clicked on "Scan and Fix." After it finished fixing itself it wouldn't open anything at all. I got mad and upset sure that it had died and taken 2 years of pictures with it and I tossed/hurled/slammed it onto the table next to me. A little while later I decided to give it one more shot and guess what??? It worked!! So, as we speak I am transferring about 60 MB of data onto a different external hard drive. My computer says it's going to take about 16 hours. After I get it onto that hard drive I'm going to start going through the folders and culling all those pics and saving them to DVD so that I have them in two places. It would have killed me to lose all those pictures and praise God I didn't!!
• The whole reason I was trying to get pics off the hard drive is because I have a free photo book waiting to be made at Shutterfly and it expires soon. One of my goals for this summer is to get caught up on making photo books. I'm caught up through August of last year so I have less than a year to do. The thing that takes the longest is going through all the pictures I've taken to decide which ones go into the books.
  
• I had a few minutes to browse through Barnes and Noble on Sunday afternoon and there is a new genre of books (at least at B and N)--Teen Paranormal Romance. Basically a bunch of Twilight wannabes. There were a lot of them though.
  
• I am going to be in a wedding in September and had to go be fitted for my dress on Sunday. Unfortunately, I am right between a size 12 and a size 14. So, I had to order a 14 and in all likelihood it's going to be too big and have to be altered. I almost decided to order a 12 and then just make sure I lost that pesky 10 lbs (or 20...or 30) before the wedding. Now I think I'm going to have to really work hard not to lose any weight or it will be too much to even alter. Hahahahha....wish that were true. Seems I'm always trying to lose weight and only occasionally succeed. :0)
• The kids all made it to VBS today. Joe has a little Haitian boy in his class that doesn't speak English. Joe found this very interesting. He said that he heard the teacher tell the little boy "good job," and the boy seemed to understand so later Joe told him "good job" too.
  
• I have been struggling with contentment lately...especially with my house. It is so hard to keep clean and it shouldn't be this hard. The thing is I don't like to clean and don't spend a whole lot of time and effort cleaning. I do the main stuff but there are so many things I am embarrassed about--dirty walls for example. I just think I need a do-over. I need to move into a brand spanking new, clean house and then I just have to work to keep it that way. We moved into a dirty house 15 years ago and I feel like I've struggled ever since. I swear that dirt just seeps out of the walls. Going into people's houses that are perfectly clean make me feel worse about my house. So, if you have a super clean house please don't invite me over. You are causing me to be discontent. Unfortunately, it doesn't cause me to be motivated....

Well, it's late and I'm heading to bed. Peace out my friends!