Month: February 2021

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Lost Photos

Today my computer informs me that:

There is insufficient memory or disk space. Word cannot display the requested font.

As far as I’m aware, I haven’t ‘requested’ any special font, I’ve just opened Word as I do every morning. I close the message, and the usual one about my cloud storage being full. The blank page appears in ‘draft’ format – the right-most of the format icons on the bottom tool bar. I click on the left-hand icon, which is apparently called ‘print view’, and the page appears in the normal format. This is the second time this has happened lately.

I check, just in case, on File Explorer, and note that my hard drive has 718 GB free out of 918 GB – in other words, oodles of spare capacity. I should really do something about the cloud space though, delete some more photos from Google photos, but it will only fill up again – it’s been like this since at least before I got my current phone, which regularly reminds me how many weeks it is since it’s been able to backup to the cloud – well over two years’ worth, if I remember correctly.

Speaking of which, I mentioned the other day that it was surprising that my rotating desk top photos didn’t include any from the last part of my journey. I decided to correct that, and had a look in the ‘Europe 2012’ file on my external hard drive, when I had a shock. This drive holds the contents of the old hard drive of my original laptop, made for me before I went travelling by an IT guy (met through those networking breakfasts) who advised me on a replacement laptop. He offered to take the old laptop off my hands and put the drive into a casing for an external hard drive, so I could keep all the data from the original laptop, and also use it as a backup drive. When I was travelling I backed up my photos, notes and blog posts onto it, and I still have it attached to my current PC, which is where I found the desk tops file. The shock came when I realised I didn’t have any folders at all for the later places: my last few days in Norway, then Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels. Nor did I have any backups of the ones taken in the following years including all the ones I took when I lived in Prague.

Those photos should all be on the laptop I used in those years, until the beginning of 2015, just before I moved here, when I got a new one (the one I spilt coffee over and replaced with this PC in 2017). Fortunately I still have that laptop which I took travelling, the one I call my Old, Old laptop. I’ve seen it – and had it working – in the last year. I’ve been looking for it for two days (well, on and off). It must be in this study somewhere…

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Calendar Puzzles

Imbolc, Candlemas, Ground Hog Day… my hatred of January used to extend to February too, but now I’m more relaxed about them both. February is the month when I: moved into my first flat (2009); ran away to Europe (2012); came back from Prague (2014); started chemo (2017)… I could go back further into previous lives and remember: broke off my engagement (1975); had a miscarriage (1985); lost my Dad (1999)… 1996 wasn’t that great either, for reasons I won’t go into, and no doubt I could dig out other disasters if I thought some more, but at least for this century 2009 and 2012 were positive, and 2017 was too, if not particularly pleasant at the time (actually 1975 was positive too, but the mistake was that I didn’t stick with that decision).

February… well we all know it’s the shortest month and the only one that has different numbers of days depending on the year (but still stays the shortest). Why, when the calendar was being designed, wasn’t it given a couple of extra days, taken from, say August and December, to make seven 30-day months and only five 31-days, or six of each in Leap Year? Even better, why not alternate them by making February, April, June, August, October and December 30 days , with the Leap Day added at the end of December? Aha, that rings a bell now, isn’t it the case that March used to be the first month, which would make February the last month, which would at least make sense of Leap Day being then?

The Celtic quarter days are at the beginnings of February, May, August and November, which are not exactly mid-way between the equinoxes and solstices, but do correspond to the beginnings of calendar months – isn’t this something to do with the adjustments that had to be made to the calendar to deal with the fact that somewhere in the middle of the last millennium it was noticed that the seasons had moved since Julius Caesar’s time because the solar year isn’t exactly 365-and-a-quarter days long, and hence we don’t need a Leap Year exactly every four years, but more like 97 years out of 400? Every time I start asking these calendar questions I know I could just look them up on Wikipedia, but I’m not Wikipedia and I like to raise the questions and make everybody else as confused as I am.

I’m also puzzled by the fact that according to some sources Imbolc/Candlemas is on the first of February, while others say it’s the second. Why worry about things which have their roots back in times when few people were literate anyway, and they were probably decided – quite arbitrarily –  by various factions of various religions, and not in some boring, rational unified way?

But why is Groundhog Day now so closely linked with time repeating itself? Is it just down to the Bill Murray film, and why did the writers decide to do that?