Cautiously optimistic ...

I am sitting at my desk in the back office of our house and I am actually using my repaired computer! After much research and development, e-mails and phone calls back and forth to Adam, Mr. Jones has finally put all of the pieces back together (switching out some components and eliminating others) ... and other than a mess-up with my camera software (it refuses to upload), everything seems to be working A-OK. We used the card reader to upload a few pictures I took while on a walk this afternoon.

And the very best news ... all of my card files that were on my desktop have been completely retrieved! Hurray! Plus, everything has been backed up onto my external hard drive so that even if this new-fangled repaired computer fails, we will be able to just plug the hard drive into another computer and all will be well. I am SO relieved!

I am sad to lose what I suppose everyone else considers a dispensable photo program, the Microsoft Photo Editor, that came with Windows all those years ago. I have used it so long and it is SO easy to crop and fine tune a picture ... light, color, size, some very cool special effects ... but it is now gone. I do have Photoscape that I will continue to use and to love ... but I always tweeked my photos first with Microsoft before I even took a picture over to Photoscape.
We woke up again today to more beautiful snow. Really wet and heavy snow! Shoveling the driveway was a job and a half! Once it was cleared, I drove over to Comstock Park and took a little walk down by the railroad tracks. There are beautiful trails back into the woods and a great sledding hill that I didn't even know about until today! Next Christmas when everyone is home for the holidays, the little kiddos would have such a blast on that hill ... and it's closer than Richmond Park is to our house.

Well, since I was without all of my pictures for nearly two weeks, I am very behind on making cards for folks ... so I'm going to get busy ... right now!