Time and a puppy movie

They say the reason time was invented was to keep everything from happening at once. Well, take my word for it, time needs work. I think it's still in beta!

We have a puppy that wants to chew on everything and has more energy than the nuclear reactor up the road at Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux can produce. And it's been raining, or at least drizzling, for a few days now (we are paying a heavy price for that hot summery month of April), so we can't really put the dog outd... I mean, spend time outdoors with the dog.

We have company coming for the weekend so we are trying to clean the house at least a little bit. Callie loves cleaning rags, however, and every time I start to dust something or wipe a window or the woodwork clean, she thinks that's a grand game. She snatches the cloth or sponge out of my hand if she can, and if she can't get the cleaning cloth she goes for my pants leg or my socks and sandals.

So we are busy enough, and then last night I came downstairs to my desk to turn my computer off and I saw a scary message on the screen saying that my D drive had a problem and I needed urgently to run checkdisk. Walt said when this happened to him he just restarted his computer, chkdsk.exe ran automatically after the machine rebooted, and everything was fine. Whew!

I restarted my computer. Checkdisk didn't run, and Windows Explorer told me that there was absolutely no D drive on my computer. OK, don't panic. I think it's mostly backed up. It's the drive I keep about eight years' worth of photos on — that's something like 120 GB. But I do monthly backups, so no big worries there. But what else was on the D drive? Documents I need for my carte de séjour (residency permit) or for banking and currency conversions? I decided to go to bed and try to figure it out in the morning. I slept fitfully.

I took my computer apart this morning before restarting it and vacuumed out the dust that had accumulated in all the vent openings and interstices of the case and motherboard. Then I worked up the courage to restart the machine and, praise be to Bill Gates and the nerd gods, chkdsk.exe started up automatically during the boot process. It took a long time the run, I thought, but when it finished, there was my D drive again. Intact.

I quickly did a backup on DVD of everything on the drive that was not in my Photos folder, so now I'm tranquille — serein, même. But can I trust the drive to be reliable now? Do I need to buy a new one, just to be safe? Major stress. I hope all the backup CDs I've made over the years to archive my photos will prove to be readable. There is some talk these days that the CDs and DVDs you burn on your home computer have a pretty short shelf life — as short as four or five years.

Back to the housework now. Our friends arrive tomorrow afternoon. They are not staying here, but at a B&B down the road. With the puppy and all, it seemed smarter. But since it's going to be a rainy weekend, we will have to have them to dinner indoors instead of in the garden, where we would like to entertain them.

While I'm cleaning, écoutez-moi bien : back up your hard disk. Now!

Here's a little movie of Callie that I took last week and finally managed to get uploaded to Google video. The quality is not great, but it will give you an idea of what Callie really looks like, in movement and up close.



Re: the birthdays — Gabby, are you sure you weren't born French? I think you did exactly what Josette is planning to do in the way of the birthday celebration, but with fewer guests. She will be 80, so you are still a gamine, tu sais. Glad to see you back on line.