More talkative, but not much else

Workouts as such sucked on the weekend too, but by then I'd given up on the whole idea, and was just trying to recover and feel better.

Saturday I was out for a very nice run with buddies down in Fish Creek. Only 5 K, 42 minutes, taking it very easy on the ice. There were lots of places skates would have been appropriate, but there was usually at least some pavement to run on.

It was a surprisingly windy cold dank day, considering how warm this month has been overall. The main thing for one of the runners was her first 5 K outdoors! Her confidence is boosted enormously for a 5 K race she's entered in later this spring.

Monday I was feeling a bit of trepidation about going back in the pool. It's been almost a week, and I've been having some shoulder and chest muscle pain. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I started out with the whole 50 m training pool to myself. All of it! That didn't last, but I kept the whole lane to myself.

1 K, 19:50 long course. I haven't swum it that slow in quite a while. Tried 100 m aiming for strong but not all out, thinking I'd be 95 seconds or so. Not. 105 seconds. I suppose the pace is all of a piece, just feeling slow.

The novel is chugging along. I'm up to a hair under 63 K words. The last couple weekends have been amazing. I'm at a spot where I'm contemplating some choices to see what happens to my protagonist and all her buddies, and her several enemies.

The big non-event of the weekend was updating all my Apple devices. I was several releases behind on operating systems because I was spooked about Photos and iTunes. The latter is still an abomination. There's an album I bought from Apple, it plays on the ipad, but nothing else. Sigh.

I'm embarrassed to say how long it took to figure out how to preview a song from the iTunes store to see if I wanted to buy it. I'm a bit cheesed at all the blandishments to sign up for iCloud and Apple Music, when it's just a fiendish plan to hold your own data hostage and suck you into monthly payments for the rest of your life, and push you into the next data plan bracket. Screw you, Apple! I want MY data on MY devices. That's why I bought the memory.

However, it all ended well. I'm actually liking the new photos because it pulls the date of the photo out of the metadata and sorts the photo by that. I never got that to happen in my old version, and this essentially fixes how my photos got all screwed up in a hard drive crash. So far the photostream thing seems to be working faster and more reliably but I shall see.

This isn't a fast process, though. It took the better part of two days, and I'm just finishing up the back up of the new system. Yes, I backed up everything before the upgrade, and that hard drive is now living at work. One big drive, 3 partitions, with two full bootable backups, one done with Super Duper, and the other done with Carbon Copy Cloner. Every now and then I do a new backup onto the oldest drive. What I'm really doing is backing up photos, since not much else gets done on that computer anymore. The novel is on the laptop, with an automatic backup to Drop Box, and a period manual copy to a USB drive, just in case.

What do you mean, you don't back up your hard drive?

Oh, if you think time capsule is doing it, close iPhoto, or Photos, and then do a backup. Your photos aren't backed up if the program is open. Check the backup. Time Capsule failed me once. Good thing I had all the photos on the iPad.

This is a dressed up photo from my run with Michelle a couple weeks ago. This is along the Bow, not far from the pedestrian bridge to Edworthy park. My buddy Neil Zellor is doing to an intro to your DSLR camera, and I'd love to take it. I looked up the camera he recommended and went GACK at the price, but it's not that so much. It's the time to go do it, and do the post processing. I've lots else on the go. Maybe when I take the next step to retirement. In the meantime, this is the iphone 6 and Snapseed.