Colder than Barrow, Alaska!

Winter is here! Last week an arctic vortex dipped down over the Great Lakes and our temperatures plummeted to single digits. We even closed school on Thursday due to the extreme cold. I checked the weather that morning and saw that we were 20° cooler than Barrow, Alaska!

BASKETBALL. East Robertson had two regular season games on their schedule for this month. We felt like we had an opportunity to add another win to our record last week since we had beaten Jo Byrns when we faced them before. It was not to be. Our boys played like they were still on Christmas break.

We went to tonight’s game against Springfield Middle expecting a tail whipping like last time. We were pleasantly surprised to have found ourselves ahead at halftime. We wound up losing by 16 but I’ll say that’s a respectable loss given the opponent. The District Tournament begins Thursday.

As Ben’s season draws to a close Nate’s season is just getting cranked up. He played his first game Saturday, and he contributed two points toward their victory. That’s not too bad considering that Nate is now playing in the 6-8 grade division and is one of the younger players on his team. Also, tall as he is, he’s not one of the taller players on the court. I thought he did very well for the first game of the season.

WHO’S IN THE WINDOW? Vicki sent me a neat picture the other day. She has two porcelain cardinals sitting in our kitchen window as part of her winter decor. They are about the size their real counterparts but unlike real birds they are wearing stocking caps. At any rate, the picture she sent was of these two birds and sitting in the tree outside the window eyeing our cardinals is a great horned owl. She and Jenna said the owl stayed there for almost an hour. Makes me wonder what was on the owl’s mind as it eyed those two birds in the window.

AVALANCHE. So the boys and I were here at the house Saturday, minding our own business, when we hear the sound of a small avalanche coming from the kitchen. We were perplexed initially when we went to investigate and didn’t see anything amiss. Then Ben looked in the pantry. One of the long shelves along the side wall decided to give way and all the stuff along its eight foot length came crashing down with it. It was one big mess!

We only had two things to break. Sadly they were both glass pieces from Pauline’s kitchen that Vicki had kept for sentimental reasons--a glass chicken that was a favorite of Pauline’s and a coffee pot that her dad, Jessie, made his coffee in. The rest of the stuff didn’t break which was amazing because Ben kept picking up things like the jar of honey, the bottle of vanilla, and the jar of sorghum and exclaiming, “I sure am glad this didn’t break!”

This could have been so much worse. At least we were able to get the shelf back up--more securely this time--and most of the stuff back in place before Vicki and Jenna came home.

THE DIGITAL HEADACHE. I have a love/hate relationship with computers. This is because they can make life easy and hard at the same time. They solve many problems but create new ones along the way. Take home videos for example. Years ago we had a VHS camcorder. Eventually that broke and we bought a miniDV camera. Over time that one played out and we got a video camera that recorded to its internal memory rather than a tape. This worked well until its storage filled up which meant you had to download the video to your computer if you wanted to keep it. That’s all well and good until you fill up all the available hard drive space.

My first solution was to burn our home movies to DVD. I have 34 of these with hours of footage on our bookshelf all neatly cataloged and labeled. Then a few years after making the DVDs Jenna popped one in the DVD player and discovered it wouldn’t play. I checked it in several players only to learn the lifespan of these discs is far shorter than first expected. Uh-oh.

To make a long story short, storage of digital media is a problem--one I know all too well from my experience at work. Hard drives and other media fail, and at the most inconvenient times. Fortunately I haven’t lost any pictures or videos...yet. A new complication to all of this is the smart phone. Vicki, Jenna, and I have snapshots and video clips spread between three devices and they’re not synced to our computer (because it’s too old).

I have a plan, and for the last six months I have been working to consolidate our digital memorabilia onto one large master hard drive which is backed up both off site and in the cloud. So far I’ve gotten almost all of our home videos done. Pictures are next on the list. I bring this up because I know I’m not the only one facing this problem. If you would like to know more about my backup plan or share with me what you are doing to archive your data I’d love to hear from you.

Joe