Excuses or Explanation?

I just checked when I last put up a blog post, June 2. It is now August18. Yikes! I know many of you are waiting for stories of the trip to Scotland, the Faroes, and Iceland. I did draft some posts while I was away. Since I’ve been home I’ve been avoiding the blog, or more properly all the photos I took while on the trip. I took a small, pocket camera and my cell phone and thought that would mean many fewer photos to go through at this end. There may well be fewer photos but trying to corral them all is a bit of a challenge.

I’ve yet to find a way of handling photos that works well for me. Part of that may be that I work on a Mac computer and an android phone. Not going to get into the whys and wherefores of all that now. The computers we have are 9 years old and when queried about how much we could get trading our computers in, our friendly Mac website told us, “Your computer is ready for recycling.” Uh, thanks.

We got new computers and there are still a few things I’m not sure about. I like Google photos because it works seamlessly with the blogging software I use. Google photos is telling me I’m almost out of space so I’ve tried, with R’s help, to cut down the amount of space I’m using. Factor in a bunch of dithering on my part about what to keep and what to toss and that adds up to time. I’m now ignoring the whole thing until my storage is actually full; then I’ll decide what to do. One issue solved temporarily.

Phones. The day before we were to leave for Scotland R dropped his phone on one of the two tile floors in the house. The back shattered but it still worked. Luckily I had an extra case which did an admirable job of holding the phone together until we got back to Canada. It did get a bit dicey when we had to change sim cards because each time we did, little sparkles of glass floated to the floor.

Once we got home we decided it was time to replace the phones as well. I thought I had downloaded all the photos onto my computer but I can’t find them there. A week or so after we got the new phones and I had passed my unbroken phone onto someone else, I was riding my bike up a hill and my new phone leapt out of my pocket and landed on the street. I pulled over, put my bike down, and rushed back to get the phone just as a car ran over it. It sort of worked but only half the screen would show at a time. R dug out his cracked phone and set me up with it until I could get mine fixed. All of that adds up to, you guessed it, more time.

Anyway, the phone is now fixed. I can find the photos I took on the phone in Google photos and the ones I took on the camera are on my computer’s hard drive so it’s now time to get the lead out. I’m also searching in Google drive for the posts I drafted while on the trip. I didn’t give them titles and I don’t remember how many I wrote. As I used to say to my students, “If I ever get organized I’ll be deadly!” They just laughed. I have found one post about Edinburgh, the first place in Scotland that we stayed so I should be able to get that one up in short order. I’m not sure whether to warn you about an upcoming deluge of posts or whether that’s just being optimistic. Stay tuned.

In the meantime I’ll leave you with a photo of the back of my phone case sporting a one-of-a-kind tire track on it.