A Day Inside

Those of you around Beaver Dam know we're still here. But others could be wondering why we disappeared from cyber-space the past week or more. No excuse... just working on other projects. The Journal and website sit out "there", become over-ripe, or maybe "stale" would be a better word, and readers drop off -- tired of checking and finding the same old stuff day after day. And that's just the way it is when we're at an extended camp and the weather is so conducive to outside projects.

Ah, but today, Tuesday, the weather finally cooperated and we couldn't get outside to do anything if we had wanted. The high temp was in the 50f's, it was windy, rainy, blustery ALL day. The furnace got a good workout, as did all 3 of our PCs. It was an inside day from morning to night.

One of my inside projects is backing up more than 5 years of photos and videos onto a WD Elements 500GB portable external drive. We had photos stored here, there, and elsewhere on our aging and HD-challenged machines (size is important sometimes), and it was becoming a chore to manage the thousands of images and keep them securely backed up.  My intention is to use the external drive as our "primary" central photo/video storage device, and have only recent months "backed up" on our aging PC's for ease of viewing. We also burn a DVD of all these files and ship them off-site every month or two as the last leg of our backup strategy. And, for those thinking that we backup images online... our online Picasa photo gallery contains only a small portion of the pics taken during our travels, and they're not full sized copies... and thus, not really backups.

I also recently had a touch of flu??? or, more likely, a bad cocktail onion in a gin martini the other night. It only lasted a few hours and I was back to near-normal after a day or two. And no knowing snickers from the audience please... it was just one stinkin' drink... OK?

Another outside project that's almost complete is a 100 sq. foot paver patio conveniently placed right next to the RV pad out here at the farm. I don't know why, but Dar has this innate desire to pave things with brick or concrete pavers. She's done it before (remember Rockport?)... she'll do it again. She enlisted my help as a class 3 laborer for this project and I think it's lookin' pretty darned good. We now have a dry place for morning coffee that will also come in handy for happy-hour (but no danged gin or cocktail onions!). One of these days we'll get photos of the project uploaded to our online photo gallery for you to use as procrastination fodder.

More soon....
T