Richard’s Personal Blog

Not been doing well health-wise over past week. Desperately need more sleep.

Spent most of weekend organizing and backing up digital photos that I hadn’t bothered doing since *gasp* 2003! Eight 4GB DVDs burned. Total number of pictures taken for each year since the last backup: Rest of 2003 = 1,300; 2004 = 4,900; 2005 = 1,900 (slow year?); 2006 = 4,600; 2007 = 4,500. That’s a total of over 17,000 pictures that were in danger of being lost given any significant hardware failure. Yikes! That’s 12+ pictures per day on average. For 2008, I’m way over 15 pictures per day so far…

Christened my auger today. Had it for several years but never had the “opportunity” to give it a whirl. Unclogged a nasty disgusting mess blocking the shower drain, reachable only by dismantling the pipes under the wet bar in the living room. Yuck.

Major drama on the Illinois family front. Too personal to post, but suffice it to say I’m starting to feel much saner than previously thought.

On the roller coaster ride with Anna as its namesake, looks like there’s been further commitment by the Southern California family. At this point, I’m not counting my chickens until they’re hatched — or counting my orphan safe until she’s adopted. (Over 480 pictures above had something to do with Anna! All safely backed up now!)

Done nothing but work for the past seven days. Fortunately, I’ve been able to work at home since December 21st, but it’s hard to work when everyone else at home is either on vacation or unemployed; the temptation is much stronger to blow it all off. Especially hard when the eight-year-old wants me to play games and do stuff with him instead of sitting at my desk working.

A hurricane-strength storm blew strongly by this weekend. We lost some randomly located roof tiles and suffered some non-damaging flooding. I had to stop working on Friday for a couple hours — one hour to dig a 20-plus-foot drainage trench out to the street behind our house, another hour to recuperate. We fared better than many, however; several neighbors lost tree limbs, significant sections of their roof tiles, and flood damage. The tennis court at a nearby park suffered damage to the surrounding chain-link fence when a tree came down and crushed it. A few houses even had trees fall on them, damage unknown.

The year-in-pictures phlog is going well; haven’t missed a picture yet — so far.

I’m getting old, a sign of which is that I now have eyeglasses for distance. Fortunately, the 12/31 eye exam and glasses used up the remaining dollars available in my FSAs. Used every penny, managing to use $6,199.92 in pre-tax monies for 2007.

No word on the status of Anna yet. I find myself looking at the clock several times a day, adding eleven hours, and wonder what’s happening in the orphanage at that hour. I feel very out of touch as to what’s going on, which is probably (but unfortunately) appropriate.