I am slightly superstitious. I would hope most people are. Not sure why, but I am and I do. Anyway, I didn’t say Rabbit Rabbit last month. Which meant, according to the lore, I think, that I was to have a bad month. Well, it didn’t seem particularly bad to me. Until last night. At around 11 I believe, I decided that I needed to order more copies of Bar Dreams, finally. I will be able to sell copies while I am on the road I think. Every little shekel will help. Anyway, that would have entailed me going to a website that I rarely go to.

So I popped open my…wait, where did it go? Maybe I closed it at some point…but no, it isn’t showing up on the recently closed menu or in the window menu. Hmm. I wonder what happened. Oh, maybe I deleted it by accident from my iCloud account as I was sharing that file between my phone and my computer. Sadly, it was over 30 days ago that I deleted it so, poof. It was gone. From everywhere. And unretrievable. Consequences of actions, don’t you know.

Time to make a solution. Start a new file. Think where an older copy of the file might be – on my old laptop. Which I need to use a monitor with since it’s screen is kaputt. Hmm, I have this vague memory of erasing the files from the iCloud drive – iCloud had complained that my drive was almost full. At the time, I thought I would just delete a lot of crap up there that I haven’t and won’t touch for the rest of my life I don’t think. But…just in case, the pack rat in me unlimbered a large storage device and copied everything I was deleting onto that device. Just in case.

And I had a case. As I was not sleeping last night, I had this memory, asked siri to remind me of it in the morning – not that I was likely to forget – to see if the data was on one of my drives. And I promptly fell asleep.

Now it is morning, I have gotten out of bed and retrieved the drives. I need to look and see if the file (and a second fairly important and tediously created file) were indeed on that drive. And, lo and behold, verily I say unto you – backing up is important. And saving everything isn’t necessarily a bad trait. Both files are now copied safely to my local laptop. Whether they will be shared again is something else entirely. But, phew and huzzuh! Time to order me some books!

Oh no!! This might have been how I looked when I found my file had disappeared

The rest of the day was spent helping my helpers. Yes, I had helpers today. Four of them! Woo hoo! And they got a lot done. Three of them worked on painting the back stairs together and I think everything is done except for the steps and the wall and the ceiling – all of which will go faster with rollers – which I have on my list to purchase. Meanwhile, another helper and I, mostly the helper, did some work in the basement. He sorted the pile of wood that fell into “keep” and “let go” – and let go of about half of it which is probably right. I’ll get him to clean up that pile next week I think. And he started cleaning the work bench which had accumulated a whole lot of crap in the past few years. All in all, money well spent on work that definitely needed doing. And I didn’t have to do too much! Woo hoo!

We shall see how many come back next week.

Now it is dinner time. I have thawed pizza dough and wings. And I guess I will make a salad too, since I have more romaine lettuce now.

Augustus for President: I downloaded LibreOffice because it has a database option. From the little I have done, it doesn’t seem to work in a very wysiwyg sort of way. I stumbled through a bit of creation of the database I want to create. But then I got stuck. Luckily, google and you tube came through again. Google and it’s AI did a good job of giving me an overview. Then I started watching a video on the basics. I’ll keep watching that tomorrow.

I gave out a few stickers to the helpers. And admonished them to take the surveys on my campaign website. We shall see if any of them do it.