Long time no me

My sister emailed me the other day to say she hadn’t heard from me for a while. She reads my bloggingses, so that’s a sure sign that I’ve been radio silent for a while.
I’m fine.
I’ve been traveling a lot and working hard and I’ve had some computer troubles with my Mac laptop at home and no time at the office for blogging, not even on the company blog that I write most of.
I was in New Orleans last weekend for JazzFest and have some photos to post (crummy cellphone photos, though – for good ones, see Briggs’ good photos posted at Flickr). I had a great time as usual but, man, has that city taken a beating! It was heart wrenching.
In the latest go-round with the gremlin in my Mac, it appeared that my carefully backed up months worth of personal data since my previous paranoid backup had vanished from the external hard drive I’d backed it all up to. But my friend MichaelZ suggested I run Disk Warrior on the Lacie drive and sure enough the missing folder reappeared! A rare happy ending in the realm of data loss.
I’ve learned my lesson, sort of, from last year’s loss of about six months of personal information. More and more of the stuff I care about is stored “out there” instead of here. It’s still vulnerable, of course, but it’s somewhat more professionally maintained with redundant backups and such.
Still, when your computer is failing intermittantly, as mine’s been doing, you stop trusting it so much and you stop using it so much, and that’s at least a part of why I haven’t been blogging regularly.
Right now I’m paying bills. It doesn’t sound fun, but getting it done will complete my “to do’s” for the weekend (more or less) and that will feel good. It may even still be light out and a little cooler with some time for another swing in the hammock before the next work week comes crashing down on me.