TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

We are experiencing technical difficulties.  Please stand by.  We’ve all seen that on our TV screens or heard it on our radios.   For sure, it ALWAYS happens right in the middle of an exciting show.  Never fails.

For the past couple of weeks, my computer has been giving me the warning that “your startup disk is almost full”…..then “your startup disk is full”.   Well, all of you who know me well know that I am not a computer guru.   Not even close.  Not even in the ball park.  If you thought I was a computer guru, sorry, you were wrong.  I get excessively stressed inside when I try to deal with such difficulties.

Rewind to 2008.  I had saved my $5 bills for two years in anticipation of spending them for a laptop Macbook computer.  I did that very thing.   I wanted to take my $5 bills into the Apple store and pay in cash, but The Girl said that might not be a very good idea.   She said the cashier AND the people in line behind me would probably do something very not nice.   To me.  So I didn’t pay in cash.  But I happily brought that computer home and learned enough to do what I wanted to do with it.  Mainly send and receive emails and store and edit photos.  And all of you who know me well know that most likely the majority of the time included dealing with my photographs.  Many, many photographs.  I love iphoto and I love taking and working with my photos.

After the happy/sad church service on Sunday, we went to Red Lobster for lunch—it’s our comfort food place.  I enjoyed the four course special which included Key Lime Pie for dessert which I could eat without too much guilt.  Then I came home to put my baptizing photos on my computer.  This was the beginning of sorrows and extreme technical difficulty.  That little startup disk warning wouldn’t stop.  My photos wouldn’t all load.  I was distressed and began to try to find the problem.   For a non-computer-guru, that is not an easy task.  I got out my trusty reference guide, "Macbook for Dummies”.  I spent until 9 p.m. trying....and trying...and trying.  Never did get all the photos loaded.  I did discover with the ones I did load that all I took with my short lens had a fuzzy, foggy spot in the center from the humidity.  Gloom.  Despair.  Agony.   The good news in that is that I think I can edit and make that okay.

I went to cardio yesterday morning for physical stress relief and came home again to the computer.   After researching, trying, researching, trying again, finally last night at about 9:30, I decided I was just going to have to call Apple and pay somebody to help me technically get my computer back on track.  That thought was painful to my pocketbook, but I was at the point of no other choice. 

During all this time, I did learn how to find out how much space is on my hard disk.  I wasn’t overly familiar with how to do that before.   Bad news is that it said there was very little free space.  So this morning I tried to call early.  Apple was not open at 5:30 a.m. so I again for one last time before calling got out my Macbook for Dummies  and sat at my computer.   I kept deleting photos but wasn’t seeing them in the trash.   Then I noticed.  I NOTICED.  There was a trash icon on my iphoto!!!  I NEVER saw it before.   Ever.  So I referred again to my Macbook for Dummies book and alas!  All the photos one deletes from their iphoto do not go in the regular trash but in the iphoto trash for safekeeping should one want to bring them back out.  Really?  REALLY?

Okay, so we’re getting somewhere now.  I began to be hopeful.   Uh huh.  You all know I take a lot of photos but you have no clue how many.   I had 11,000+ on my regular iphoto that I’m not ready to delete.  In my iphoto trash after it FINALLY loaded so I could see, I had 28,983 photos.  That’s almost 40,000 photos on my computer!  No wonder there was not space!  Unreal.  It took that iphoto trash 10 minutes to empty.

I was a bit apprehensive as I clicked to check the space on the hard disk afterwards.  Amazing!  It was a phenomenal decline and I have a boatload of space now.  I can’t tell you how I felt when I saw that.  It was like I had held my breath for hours and finally released it.  It was a relief.  Oh my goodness.   And I didn't have to pay for the advice!   I have just loaded my 300+ baptizing photos and they loaded fast and easy.  I am ready to edit and do my baptizing photo thing.  I am excited!  Ahhhhh……. I will daily empty two computer trash cans so my computer can run effectively. 

Now all that was probably not that interesting to you….especially if you ARE a computer guru.  You are probably rolling your eyes at my not-a-computer-guru status.  That’s okay with me.  I’ve decided I like to write so I thought I’d make it a blog entry anyways.  

When The Husband and I talk about things sometimes, I will make the comment “There’s a sermon in that somewhere.”  And I think we can find sermons in a lot of things in life.  I know there’s one or more sermons in this story of non-interesting  computer problems.  

I’m not going to elaborate on a sermon.  I’m going to leave that to your thoughts and imagination.  There’s one there.   You ponder it.  I have photos to edit!

YAY!!!!