Life After Windbird, Day 69: Technical Difficulties
Date: Thursday, October 20, 2016
Weather: Mostly Sunny and Cooler, High in the 60’s, Low in the 50’s
Location: At Home at The Studio, Falmouth, MA
Today I continued my battle with technical difficulties. In dealing with those, I ran into a huge backlog of photos from this summer and fall that have never been edited and organized. They are just sitting in a folder on my computer desktop waiting for me to have the time to deal with them. I was vaguely aware that I have had this huge backlog, but still it was a rude awakening today to actually see how much work I have to do. I’ve gotten behind before, but this time is even harder because I can no longer use Picasa. Google stopped supporting that program the middle of August, and I have simply not had the time to learn the new skills needed to make Google Photos do the same job for me. I have yet to been able to post a photo album in a log. I used to be able to post a whole album very easily. Only the first picture showed up on the website, but if you clicked on that you were taken to the whole album. Google Photos doesn’t really have a process that allows this. You can post one photo at a time, but not an album. Justin came up with a way for me to do this, and he even made a video to lead me through the process. But it is not an easy ‘one click’ deal. It took me almost an hour today to watch Justin’s little two minute video and take written notes so I can actually try this in the morning. I’ll let you know if it works. And if it does, I need to go back through over 3,600 posts and repost all the albums I have posted over the last eleven years as the links to those were broken when Picasa went away. But photos aren’t my only problem. My other technical difficulty is my email. If I want to send or receive email from my computer, I have to do it the second I turn the computer on. If I wait, it won’t go. So today I backed up major files from my computer and will take the computer into the shop tomorrow. For years Mark has been my technology go-to person and because he was so good at it, I just let him do everything. So I have a tough learning curve ahead of me. Thankfully I have Heather and Justin to fall back on when all else fails. But I will continue to try and figure this out on my own the best that I can.
My early morning was spent at the gym in a group training called “Butts and Guts”. I knew from the name this was going to be a tough one for me, but I made it through and did my cycling afterwards. Tomorrow morning I attend another training group in indoor cycling. I’m anxious to see what this involves. And I ended my day by going to Heather and Jed’s for dinner. They had planned to come here, but Heather was then asked to watch the kids next door and thought it would be easier for me to come there. I ordered the pizza, picked it up, and Heather made a salad. It was not a gluten-free dinner for me, but it sure was easy and all the kids ate. During dinner Heather asked the kids to talk about their day and she mentioned that Oma went to an exercise class and that they should ask me the name. They asked and I told them, and they immediately started chanting “butts and guts”—they thought the name was hilarious. Brian took Molly and Joey home and I stayed and read bedtime stories to Ollie while Heather read to Jonah and Jed read to Sam. It was Ollie’s turn to bring the preschool mascot, Swimmy, home for the weekend and they let him come home with Ollie a day early. Ollie enjoyed posing with Swimmy so I could get a photo.
It was a fun evening. Heather has an evening work commitment tomorrow, so I will return there to be with Jonah and Ollie until Sam and Jed get home from soccer practice. Then on Saturday morning I’ll be off to New Hampshire.
