Is that a light at the end of a tunnel? Photo: L. Weikel

In a Daze

I’m in a daze this evening. The fact that I didn’t walk today is partially to blame. But the more significant cause of my malaise is the six straight hours I spent in front of our computer painstakingly recreating our Quicken records for the past nine months. And I don’t even have the job halfway completed.

Yes, this is all my fault.

As you may recall, back when I was rediscovering the reality of ‘zoomies,’ the pups accidentally snagged the charging cord on my Dell laptop, sweeping the machine clear off its table like a magician performing a tablecloth trick. Only the laptop was the tablecloth (not the china), and it dropped with a swoosh onto the rug.

Alas, in spite of an initially optimistic diagnosis by the local computer repair shop, it was pronounced deader than a doornail about a week later. Specifically, something broke in the hard drive, rendering it unreadable without investing a couple thousand into an attempt at recapturing the information (i.e., no guarantees).

Even though I was proud of myself for having intermittently backed up both laptops on an external hard drive, it seems my sense of timing is a bit skewed by the pandemic. (At least that’s my excuse.) Turns out it’s been a lot longer since I backed them up than I realized. Seven months, to be precise. And since I’m only just now getting around to reconstituting all the financial data I kept in Quicken, I’m now tasked with entering nine months’ worth of entries. And not just our personal stuff, either.

A Perfect Day

The dismal, overcast, gloppy weather today lent itself perfectly to putting my nose to the grindstone. I became lost in my task, barely taking time to even get up from my workspace until well after dark. Looking out the window as the hours ticked by failed to distract me from my task. All it did was make me sad because I knew I had no intention of walking in drizzle.

I think Karl feared what I might concoct for dinner after such single-minded focus on figures, so he ran out for pizza without even telling me ahead of time. I’d planned on making a stew with dumplings, but he assures me a cold snap later this week will make the stew even more welcome a few days from now.

As frigid as the temperatures were last night (it was 18 degrees at 6:00 p.m.), judging from my most recent visit to the outdoors with the pups, the air feels weird tonight. It feels warmish out there and that doesn’t feel right to me. All of which exacerbates my sense that I’m in a daze.

But since I know I’m going to be toiling over this data entry for at least a couple more days, I just want to preach from the mountaintop: back up your data regularly and often. Preferably more often than every seven months.

(T+33)