Semester and Photo Problems

This fall has sped by faster than any other season I remember. Despite the drought the leaves have been pretty. The weather is even sillier than usual and we've had several late, lovely days. The chaos of the beginning of the semester has leveled off, and going into the final stretch I can shoot for A's and be assured of B's.

I watched the election at Ragtag with Tina and Nash. Kind of funny to see Obama's first and second elections during my first and last years at Mizzou.

I don't have proper internet this year, just 3G bluetoothed over from my iPhone. So that's meant less surfing, less Facebook, less emailing, less Skyping, less blogging.

I somewhat lament the blogging. I definitely lament being in such poor touch with various internet and far away friends.

But there are good sides to it, as well. I've read more and watched more movies. I've definitely been enjoying living in an apartment and being able to cook.

I'm slowly, slowly working through the knot of all my photos. It's tricky, trickier than it should be. I should have just been more careful and organized along the way. Here's what happened, basically -

I ran out of space.

Several times, really, but most critically in my final month-or-so in Scandinavia, post-Faroes.

Pretty much out of money and wanting very much to spend my last kroner on Icelandic pony rides rather than outlandishly expensive Nordic storage medium taxes, I threw pictures everywhere I could. I filled up my two external hard drives. I filled my macbook so full that, as I've later found out, I'm lucky it never corrupted and crashed. In the last stretch, pictures of my farewell parties, those last mountain hikes, my trip to Stavanger and Liisa's Iceland pictures got crammed onto my netbook.

My own Iceland pictures were left on the memory cards.

In D.C., I bought another hard drive with excellent intentions. I put the Iceland pictures on there, as well as various photos from my time in D.C., as that went on. I also backed up the Faroese pictures, which were precious to me and which I hated only having one copy of. I had intentions of sorting the rest of it, too, but I didn't have much time and it's all way more time consuming and difficult and confusing than I reckoned, so my half-hearted attempts only made things a bigger mess.

I'm honestly amazed that I (knock on wood) never lost a single photo in all of this, in lugging external hard drives and laptops across borders and messing around with them and moving stuff here and there and cramming stuff here and improperly labeling this and putting these folders in the completely wrong album and blah blah blah. No hard drive crashes (though there were scares!), no accidental formats, no deleting one folder when I meant to kill another.

And, two new hard drives later, I'm finally getting somewhere with the organization. At least the macro organization of being able to see all my photos (sort of) in the right place, have the presence of mind to know they're all there, back up that collection properly, and, maybe, this year or next, getting ready to start ACTUALLY sorting them.

All 200,000 of them.

O.O