I cleaned up my computer’s hard drives. All four of them. Every single hard drive that was saved from fire, flood, crash-and-die and – truth be told – cat pee. Every hard drive that somehow survived long enough to be reinstalled on top of a “new” hard drive in a “new” computer, every one of them used, rebuilt, re-purposed, bought-on-the-cheap in a moment of desperation (so many moments of desperation), and then left to reside side-by-side in a not-quite-integrated neighborhood of semi-cooperation, in one house, one maze, no GPS available.
(FYI, I still have my very first hard drive, from my very first computer! How many of you can say the same? [And would you even dare admit?]
I’m quite certain there is an easier way to do this, some kind of synchronization. My computer guy back in Missouri offered to do it free of charge the very last time I visited him when my last hard drive took a dive. But I was so afraid he would lose something…something important…so important! So I said, “Thanks, but no thanks. I would love that kind of project. It will be fun!”
(Speaking of synchronization, I could also use some mental synchronization, but I’m not sure I trust a shrink to know what to save and what to toss either!)
Anyway, at one point, I was convinced it would require a whiteboard, or a wall-sized bulletin board with hand-drawn maps and arrows and computer-family trees. Maybe I could turn it into a weird work of art.
Well, it only took me a couple of years, it only required a pen and half of a spiral notebook (so far) and it has been kind of fun and extremely satisfying (so far), like the ultimate spring-cleaning project. But the nitty-gritty still awaits: hoping I didn’t delete anything crucial (like a program or a .exe file, right?!), not to mention re-visiting all of the (as-yet-unopened) files that I deemed worthy of saving: my life in review…
…Blogs, photographs, letters, writing projects, freelance projects, art projects, nutrition school research projects. (An awful lot of projects, unfinished...wait...no...in progress!)
Also buried in the Netherlands of my old, boxy computer are some Neanderthal, barely-functioning software programs, programs that these days require a monthly subscription ($$$) and, no doubt, a modern operating system. I’m still running Windows XP, if you can believe it. And, gee, there’s the cloud for storage now, right?
I’m really expecting (oh, that word!) that this will be one of my last looks back into my past (at least until I get my hands on my journals once again, written from the age of 14 [!!??] and currently residing on a pallet in New Mexico). I am making a supreme effort at re-purposing the useful and tossing out the crap. Replicating rather than duplicating. (I think there might be a fine-line-difference between the two. Or maybe they’re the same.)
But I can’t be the same, and I can’t be different.
I can’t quite wrap my head around all of it, but one thing I know for sure is that quite soon I will be able to afford (and hopefully actually desire and make use of) some new software (for both my head and my computer!)…
…when I start my new job (career?) on September 24.
Stay tuned.