Jim's Place

Ups and Downs

The last couple of days have had both highs and lows. Let's start with Sunday's Mission Conference. That was definitely a HIGH! Pastor Scott did a great job of putting it together and it was awesome seeing the Joy Dome filled. I agreed on someone else's blog that I'd love to see us go to one service on Sunday. Not only will that crowd the dome, but there are so many members that we never get to see because we don't go to the same service. The only drawback of that is that there would probably be only one session of LIFE Groups, so Lucy and I would have to either give up our LIFE Group (Willie Meggs') or give up teaching 2nd grade Sunday School. I want to give a special "well done" to the drama team.

I said there were ups and downs. Well, on Saturday, my computer started acting a little funny (not "ha ha" funny, if you know what I mean). I had problems running some of my regular programs and got messages telling me to reinstall. I did, but it didn't work. There were other things wrong too, but I won't bore you with it. It became obvious that I was going to have to reformat my "C" drive and rebuild it. It is only 120GB, but I had over a hundred programs on it. Supposedly, the good news is that I have two other hard drives (a 2nd 120GB internal one and a 200GB external one). So, before I reformatted the C-drive, I made backups of all my important data files, etc on the external drive. Anyway, I started about 3:00 pm on Sunday with the monumental task and everything seemed to be going smoothly until I had a hiccup (actually my computer did) as I was rehooking up my external hard drive. The result was that all my files on it were made unreadable and that hard drive also required reformatting. By this time it was 11:30 pm and I decided it was time to go to bed (old folks need their sleep).

And, I thought I was so smart backing up all my important stuff to that drive. One of the worst parts of this is that I do a lot of video editing and that is the primary purpose of my external drive. For the past couple of weeks I've been working on a video "promo" for the Northwoods' Orchestra for Ms. Laura. Dozens of hours of work was lost. I've still got the original video on the tape in my camera, but I have to start all over again with the editing.

The next GOOD news is that Monday is (one of) my golf day and I got to relax and forget about the computer for several hours. It was another beautiful day for golf and I enjoyed the sport and fellowship. However, when I got home the computer was still in the same condition it was when I went to bed last night--figure that. I have finally finished re-installing all my hardware (that, in itself, is a huge job when you have as much junk as I do) and gotten the Internet and e-mail configured. I still have the "hundreds of programs" to install, update, etc. I guess I've written enough and need to get back to rebuilding the hard drive so that I can then get started re-capturing and re-editing the orchestra project files.

posted by Jim @ 8:19 PM