Hardware

Hello again.

Hardware, on my desk. Literally.

My hard drive. 

I finally accepted the inevitable and retired my old laptop yesterday, replaced with New Shiny silver laptop which doesn't crash when I edit photos (the reason getting the Etsy shop up and running took three weeks!!) and doesn't keep losing internet connection or logging onto the neighbours' wifi instead of our own.

So this is being typed on a lovely new machine (admittedly with my older wireless keyboard) and the old hard drive sits here on my desk, awaiting its fate.

What should I do with it?

And my files are all safely* stowed on a separate hard drive, so next begins the long slog through them all, deciding which to keep and which to dump. The computer shop offered to transfer everything over, but I wanted New Shiny to come with new shiny and empty folders - why start with clutter already!!

*There was a brief sweat-inducing pulse-elevating moment yesterday afternoon when I needed to email two documents to a Guild for workshop information, and couldn't find any of the relevant folders. Turns out they were there all along, but hiding. Phew!

But because this long slog through the files is my next task, I'm obviously not doing any of it, and I'm playing with a different sort of hardware.

Do you know how hard it is to find new things that rust these days?! These have been in vinegar for two weeks not really doing anything. I think they're starting to go now, exposed to the air. But I need them to hurry up because I want to do some dyeing!!

I'm going to leave them in the kitchen to get their act together, while I go for a run in the woods.

And at some point, I might even do something textile-y.

Oh yes, before I go, to explain the previous post, in brief:

1. Usual post-holiday shock of moving from a tent to a house, and everything else to do with coming home from a fabulous holiday to our favourite place, this year with our favourite people to share it with
2. We had our front garden dug up to pave it and create a wider driveway, to accommodate our two cars.
3. Skips, rubble, dust, men, noise. The whole thing. 
4. The paving blocks are lovely - see previous post.
5. We didn't use the new driveway straight away, as our little red car was poorly and didn't move from the road for two weeks until we could get it to a garage to be fixed.
6. As soon as we brought little red car home, to park on lovely new drive created especially for little red car, we realised we had a problem.
7. We can't park on our new drive. The pavement slopes up, the drive slopes down. The crest between the two is too high (by about 3 inches) and so the car scrapes the ground before you get anywhere. 
8. We now have a highly decorative, excessively wide, block path. It's a delightful path, and we love our new front doorstep, but still...
9. We are going to have to pull up half the blocks to install some raised beds on the slope, and make it look (a) deliberate (b) not like a driveway. We could apply to Highways to lower the pavement, but a brief look through the criteria says we would have our application rejected.
10. It's all very embarrassing, having to explain to the neighbours why you are not using your lovely new driveway!