Once Again

I was once told my computer was a grand-father it was so out of date. I grew up hearing my father say, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” I’m sure he was quoting someone he seldom if ever used the word ain’t. Dad would quote anything from the Bible to Shakespeare and back again. I guess I learned that philosophy from dad saying it so much but if a piece of software or hardware for that matter was working I was happy to keep using it. The person calling my computer a grandfather had sold me a new monitor because my first one finally died. He discovered when he delivered it there had to be an adaptor to link the new monitor to the old machine.

Well my computer had a version 4 Roxio CD burner. My husband wanted it to burn DVD’s as well. He took out the Roxio and put in a Sony, big mistake he got one that did not work. So he tried to put the Roxio back on so I would at least have a working CD burner and XP would not accept outdated software for rhe Roxio to go back on. we had to get software for Roxio 10 now with the new software the old hardware will do something it would not do before. I don’t understand how that can be. There are times it pays not to ask questions. Sometimes as someone uninformed as I am with computers doesn’t know the questions to ask. I have lost everything three times when my dear husband has fixed my computer to make it better.

I totally loved Quickverse 4 I started with version 2 and got upgrades between my husband and I we have up to version 12. I could comfortably find things through version 6 after that I feel like they took a really good thing and made it unusable. I  just had to get a new journal program because, you guessed it ex will not accept my old program. That is for the best the new program is something I can get a lot more use out of. If I ever try to computerize my journals again I will not do it in the journal program but on a simple word processor. Everything I put in the older journaling programs is gone for good.

I have gotten rather philosophical about my old journals. the bits that have been lost are irreplaceable but I still have all I could need.  What I am writing now and in the future are more important to me than the distant past.

As usual, I like the older program better. Grandfathers in the computer world are comforting.

Annette
“It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery- from The Little Prince.~   http://onceagain.freeblogit.com/ and
http://sites.google.com/a/wildblue.net/my-corner-of-the-world/home and
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/just4christianwomen2journal/ and http://annette-agnello.livejournal.com/

I used to have a very old copy of life Journal and it can no longer be installed on newer hard drive. I haven’t had a computer program since that nasty virus that killed my last hard drive. We had an antivirus program which should have protected the computer. Ah well…it’s gone the drive was totally trashed again. I say again because in one of my beloved’s upgrades I lost everything except the writing entries I had been saving all along. There was a lot I would have liked to keep there I asked if I needed to back up the old drive before the new one was installed. Mario was going to install it while making my old drive a secondary drive and the new one primary. I had that set up twice before and it worked then but the newer hardware would not play fair, the duel drive setup was impossible. Because of this I lost a good 3/4 of what I had saved. I don’t know about you but I save things for a reason. I was upset with both situations that eliminated everything I had saved.

But to my new program it can do a lot of things but I simply do not have a lot of confidence in what I am doing. for instance it can post directly to a blog if you know how. I would like to add writing prompts but don’t how to do that either. I would like to move all my prompts into the program still reserving a hard copy.

On the topic of prompts I need to post some more prompts on j4cw2j sight. To some extent that well is running dry. I never expected as much work but it is a good thing I accepted the moderator position Marshell’s life is such that if no one was the acting moderator the group would have fizzled. I do like the group though there are some things I would do differently now that I know a bit more. It was a learning experience and I needed the experience.

Annette
“It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery- from The Little Prince.~ http://onceagain.freeblogit.com/ and
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/just4christianwomen2journal/ and http://annette-agnello.livejournal.com/

For once I am trying to get today’s entry done before bed time. Today I had my sister-in-law over for lunch. It’s nice to see her without her daughter. It gets blamed on her late husband doing all the discipline. When he died she needed to step up to the plate and be the parent, sitting limits providing guidance, and sometimes discipline.  She has been trying to be the child’s best buddy ever since her husband died. The child has been running the show since she was three. The only way Gianina could come here today was slipping over during school, sort of behind the child’s back.

I have been running late on things lately because so much has demanded my attention right now. As bad an attitude as I have been getting about Christmas this year all the prompts are about Christmas. I know, I wrote them for the group I’m in. Today’s prompt was: “Christmas past, Mother as a child wrote about her Christmas presents, have you ever written about one of your Christmases?”

My mother to my knowledge only kept a diary a few months when she was a child. I have that diary. When she wrote about Christmas in that little notebook. There were eight kids and very little money for a farm family. She told of an orange, a dime, a few pencils, and other very small gifts. The orange sounded like the biggest deal. My parents always tried to get gifts we would like. My two brothers were a lot older than I was so I never saw them get a toy. I had inherited some of their old toys as they grew up and moved away.

The Christmas I remember best was my second year of collage. My roommate had a small collection of Raggety Anne dolls. Did you know they have a date on their labels her oldest one was from the 1940’s. My time living with her the Raggety Anne dolls were 48 years old. She convinced me I should get one, she convinced me to want one. That year the younger of my two brothers spent Christmas with us with all his family. His first born was about four and sitting on the floor by the tree with me. Helping hand out the presents. Mother had asked me what I wanted so she got her twenty year old girl the Raggety Anne doll she wanted. My niece then four took one look at the doll and screamed, Mine!” I had to convince her that was my doll, hers was in the next box. It was not a Raggety Anne and I don’t believe Alisa was ever satisfied with it but I was going to keep my doll. Remember I was much younger then…

Annette
“It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery- from The Little Prince.~ http://onceagain.freeblogit.com/ and
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/just4christianwomen2journal/ and http://annette-agnello.livejournal.com/

I joined NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) today I have been trying to do more bloging and journaling in general. I guess I am trying to do so much I have this blog, an online journal, and five, (count them five), paper journals going right now. One is an art journal, where I draw illustrations or paste in various pictures I have collected. This touches my creative side nobody ever sees. The second through forth are for various forms of study. The final one is a normal journal with daily events and such.

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To join NaBloPoMo they asked for a profile. I never know what to say in that I talk about writing and mention my husband. It always feels strange about doing profiles. This is what I said today:

•    [I have been keeping a journal for over 30 years. I have been writing for publication nearly all that time. First poems, then articles, devotionals, and my one and only short story also got published. My writing tends to be more reality based. I am currently working on a book on journaling. I have been happily married for seven years.]

A bit skimpy isn’t it? As much as I write I am seldom the topic.

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Since I made a commitment to post on my blog I guess I need to post this.

First Prompt from The Writer’s Idea Book by Jeff Heffron (pg 7)
“Writer Thomas McGuane goes to his study at a certain time every day and stays there for a scheduled length of time. He sits at his desk. “I don’t have to write,” he explains, “but I can’t do anything else.” Try his approach for a week, scheduling a specific period of time, during which you must sit at your desk or wherever you write. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.”
I guess copying the prompt form the book was breaking the rules but it is something of an unnatural thing to just sit and do nothing. This morning I set an egg timer it is ticking LOUDLY. I should have just decided to go by the clock chimes. You can’t just do nothing I’m wondering where the book with all my notes on writing books is. And I find my eyes scanning the bookshelves looking for it. The timer rang but it kept ticking loudly, I will double the time becaues aside from being confined to a chair I was getting something done. I’m still wondering where the book I keep notes in is. It should be on the shelf by the desk, perhaps a shelf in the night stand instead. No such luck, it turned out to be in the shelves by the desk hiding behind the post which holds up the shelves. I suspect thinking about the book kind of defeated the purpose of the exercise but I did write something and find the missing book. Tomorrow no loud timer and no book to scan the shelves for.

I’m Dissapointed With What FaithWriters Has Become

I joined FaithWriters years ago and loved it to pieces. At first it was a friendly supportive group and it was a big help in my writing it let me see there were caring people some of whom were even worse writers than I was. It gave me hope to submit things for people to actually read. There was incentive for people to read the articles and those who read them left useful comments, rangeing from a simple “nice article” to a useful suggestion for making it a better article. After a couple of years they started a magazine called FaithWriters 500  and early on I joined that too and got at least one article published in every issue for the first year. Then instead of having different editors for each department of the magazine there was one editor. Debbie, never accepted any of my work. Then they gave perks of sort to the members of FaithWriters 500 which I never really got. When FaithWriters 500 had it’s own message board I enjoyed it but when it became part of the general message boards that died for me. After staying a member for over 8 years I let the membership lapse only to once again get screwed. In the time I was simply not going to the sight they took away some of the things anyone on the sight could take part in now they belong to FaithWriters 500 members.  I want to find an alterative to FaithWriters that is not being destroyed from within.

After a long dry spell I am writing journal entries again. Here are the first two in a while.

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911 not remembered by some.

* Sep. 12th, 2008 at 5:41 AM

One of my groups had a prompt about remembering what you were doing when the event happened. The person first person to answer started talking about Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murders. Talk about not getting the point. Thousands died when the planes hit, as bad as they were murders in one home situation didn’t hold a candle to the thousands who were killed in the Sept 11,2001 event . Everyone answering the prompt after her got off track on various “memorable events.” It seemed everyone there was remembering everything except the events which happened seven years ago. That was the point of the question in the first place.

He Found His Purr Again!

* Sep. 13th, 2008 at 9:19 AM

One of our cats had surgery for a dislocates hip to the tune of several hundred dollars. I was raised in the country and there was always someone trying to place kittens in a new home. We lived by a major highway and we were always losing cats to traffic. Before I got married I had to take a cat to the vet and have her put to sleep because of illness. You grieve for the cat then get another cat. My husband insisted we save Christopher. If he had died we could have buried him and got another cat. His own grandmother, a Russian blue, had another litter of kittens around that time, Chris was replaceable. My husband wanted Christopher or no one.  So we had him operated on.

Before his injury Chris was the purringest cat I had ever known. After he was hurt, no purr. I missed that. This morning he curled up on my desk while I was reading my mail. If you listen very carefully he has a faint purr nothing like before but he’s a purrer again.