March 14, 2007

• Sorry I haven’t been around the last couple of weeks. It is so boring
  in Liz land,  even if I had written it would be drivel. For the 4
  faithful readers still out there, I have one exciting thing coming
  up.  I’m going to go to Holland.  Lisse to be exact. I want
  to see the Keukenhof gardens and take a thousand pictures. And if at
  all possible I’m going to go from there to Amsterdam so that I can go
  to the Van Gogh and Rijks museums. I think I will more than likely end
  up riding the train over by myself.  Bear and Mike had glazed eyes
  by the time I finished telling them what I wanted to do.  Not that
  I expected them to be thrilled at spending all day looking at tulips
  and then all the next day looking at paintings, but sheesh, I at least
  expected them to stay awake while I talked about it,  I guess not
  everyone appreciates Van Gogh the way I do.

  My external hard drive crashed last week. Every picture we’ve taken
  while here in Europe was on that hard drive. As well as almost 3,000
  songs and tons of important paperwork. Like our resumes, which could be
  re-written but most of the hard copy data from that kind of stuff is
  back in the States. But the pictures and songs could never be replaced.
    Bear went to a website called file scavenger or something like
  that and bought a recovery program. we ran it and overnight it
  recovered virtually everything.  It recovered the files but for
  some reason it didn’t recover all the file names.  For the last
  week or so I’ve been wading thru one file at a time and re-naming it
  and then putting it back where it belongs. ie: Germany pictures in the
  Germany folder, Prague in the Prague folder and they all have sub
  folders. After I get the file as close to original as possible I make a
  hard copy, that way if for some inexplicable reason the new hard drive
  crashes it won’t matter. This time I’m making extra Cds. I’m giving
  Mike a copy since he was there for most trips and I’m sending a set to
  my daughter Em.(triple redundancy)  I cried when I thought I had
  lost all my pictures.  Sure I have a lot of them here on xanga and
  we’ve printed some out but the majority were in the original un-edited
  form and no-one but me has seen them.  So I was fairly devastated
  at the loss.  As soon as the recovery program ran I took a double
  layer dvd and copied all the photos onto it, ( it took 5 hours just for
  that) I would rather have my pics messy than not at all. So that has
  been my latest 10 to 12 hour a day effort. And get this, I haven’t even
  started sorting thru the music.  Gah!  My back is killing me,
  I really don’t know how computer tech can sit at a desk 8 hours a day
  all year long.  So if you wonder what I’m up to and what exciting
  thing living in Europe has afforded me, now you know. lol.

  My nose has noticed that Spring has arrived, even being stuck in the
  apartment all day my eyes are itchy, watery and red and my nose is
  stuffed up and I’m sneezing. Yay, for Spring. Time to get ready for
  Holland! I love the flowers to much to worry about the pollen.
  Go to google and type in keukenhof.com, it will bring up the gardens
  homepage, there’s a small British flag at the bottom of the page so
  that you can read it all in English,  you’ll see why I want to go
  so bad. If this really is our last
  year here in Germany it would be a crime to not go when its only 4 and
  a half
  hours by train.  Wish me luck!

  • 5:58 am
  • 11 Comments