Friday, August 12, 2011

Week 32: Missing Flash Drives and Memory Lane Therapy

After a week of working 4am's, getting a full night's sleep last night was heavenly. I don't know how people that regularly begin their day at 4am do it. They say your body adjusts to it, but I don't know... not mine I guess. All I know for sure is that there is no way I could work that shift long term.

as you may have ascertained today was my day off, and if you didn't, well now you know I guess. It was a glorious day of doing absolutely nothing, at least nothing that I had to think too much about. Sometimes it's nice to just be able to sit back and not have to think. You know? Am I right?

It's been quite a while now since I moved back home from my year at MSU. A little over a year in fact. I distinctly remembered bringing three flash drives home with me in the move, but of course could not recall where I had stowed them upon getting home. Let me remind you, more often then I'd like to admit my memory fails me. The point here, is that I've been missing these flash drives since about the time that I moved home, but I knew that they made the move with me because I distinctly remembered packing them to make the trip home.

I have remembered them off and on over the course of the past year, vaguely noting to myself that I was sure that they were here, and also that each of them was loaded with information that I wasn't really interested in losing. You know, stories and poetry, essays, music back-ups, photos... those sorts of things. The drive I was most interested in finding was the one with all the things that I have written/am in the middle of writing.

There are YEARS worth of writing on that drive. It would be no small tragedy for me to lose it, because stupidly, that data isn't stored anywhere else.

So yeah, I cared that I hadn't been able to locate these drives, but determined that I didn't care enough to go to the trouble of really undertaking a search for them. That is, until today, because what the hay, I had the day off.

Early this afternoon I began my search.

I began by sifting through the boxes at the top of my closet, which to be honest, I should have known that would be a fruitless search because it wasn't all that long ago that I went through and organized them all. Had these drives been in any of those boxes, I would have found them a couple of months ago. But I looked anyway.

This of course led to me coming across a box full of cards that I have received over the years. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, Thank you cards, Thinking of you cards... I have a plethora of cards. Is this strange? Do you hold onto the cards that people send you?

Even though I don't often look over them, I still like to keep them, just in case I might ever like to look at them, because sometimes I do. Sometimes I like to lose myself to a moment of nostalgia, to take a moment and reflect on where I've been in relation to where I am. When I find myself feeling like I'm stuck in a stand-still it's important for me to look back to see how far I've come in order to remind myself how far I have to go. When I was younger I used to feel stuck in a stand still a lot, so when I start to feel that way now I can remember those times and remind myself that it takes time to move forward and I just have to be patient even if that hard to do, especially when that's hard to do.

So, right. The flash drives where not in my closet. So I moved on to my filing cabinet. This has a ton of stuff that I've filed away from Elementary-High school as well as the mission trips that I have participated in. Once again, it was time to take a moment to traverse memory lane. But like I said, for me, moments like this are therapeutic.

Going through my "files" also gave me an idea of what to do with all of my cards. At one point in time, for some purpose now unknown, I bought a mini binder and mini plastic sleeves. I unearthed this bind in my hunt for my flash drives and it just clicked, that binder is the perfect size for cards!

At some point in the fairly near future I plan to organize my cards into binders. A kind of card scrapbook/ memory thing. It's a step up from storage in a box at the top of my closet anyway... Searching through my closet and filing cabinet took most of my afternoon, and though I wouldn't call it completely fruitless, I did not find what I had ultimately been looking for.

Rather than search further though, I took a break, and I told you all of that, so that I could tell you this... I FOUND THEM! About a half an hour or so ago I decided it was time to sit down and blog, and that I was going to tell you all about my failure to locate these flash drives, but before I sat down to write I took a second look at a cabinet I have hanging near my door. I had looked at the tin that I have sitting in this cabinet earlier today, and considered looking in there for the drives, but then discounted that idea. Why would I have put them in there?

Indeed, why did I put them in there? I have no idea. I will never know, except that I did and that is where I found them. My advice? Never make assumptions, if you think you put something somewhere, check it out no matter how crazy you think it would be for you to have placed it there, because that's probably where it is.

Oh, and just to dispel the elephant in the room, no I did not blog last week. Yes, I was supposed to, and I have no excuse for not following through last week. I will try to do better in the coming weeks.

I'll talk to you soon.

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