So Eileen and I decided not to do date-day today. Instead we’re hanging around the house and tending to things that are on our minds for Christmas. At least Eileen is.
She decorated the tree last night after I went to bed. Then after breakfast, she wrapped presents while I messed with my books. I have been organizing them in the study. Today, I also organized and cleaned up the books on the south wall which are mostly music books, African American related books, church books, and general folk music. I pulled a stack of churchy stuff I know I will not want again. I’m thinking of dropping it off at Grace Episcopal church sometime next year.
Eileen is thinking of making her Mom’s famous cinnamon rolls for Christmas. She found the recipe today, but back in 2012, we made videos of Dorothy showing her and Sarah how it’s done. I searched my exterior hard drive, Drop box, and YouTube but couldn’t find them. I put out a call on WhatsApp to Sarah and the rest of the fam. Sarah didn’t know exactly where she had them but thought she did. Elizabeth located a link in an old email. That was helpful.
YouTube is a bit cumbersome sometimes for me. Even though I had searched my videos these recording didn’t come up. It took some poking around until I located them on my YouTube channel. The difficulty was that they were private videos. Lord knows how to work with them, but somehow I managed to make a playlist and Eileen watched them on the Roku screen.
Eileen just finished and said that it was very helpful despite the fact that she was recalling how to do it correctly. Watching these videos helped her be sure she knew what she was doing. These are great Cinnamon Rolls and it will be a treat for Christmas.
I held my breath when I plugged in my ancient exterior hard drive. When we were moving the living room bookshelves to the study I managed to drop it on the floor. Ever since then I have worried that I lost information. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world but there are many Finale files which are my only access to some of my compositions.
I have never worried about saving my work for posterity. However, I was hoping those files were intact. I have thought of recomposing some of my stuff and giving some pieces some new piano accompaniment carefully written out. Having to reconstruct an old song from scratch is not as attractive as messing with one from old files. So I was relieved to see that I hadn’t destroyed this old exterior hard drive.
It looks like today was a good day to skip the drive to the beach.
I was pretty impressed with how adroitly my new phone had saved information from the old one. It even managed to restore my current milkweed wall paper. I love the way the milk weeds looked in our yard as they opened up and slowly distributed those feathery seeds.
