Sand Men

           

            I was glad I didn't need to go anywhere on Tuesday, especially on my bike, out into the messy aftermath of the first snowstorm of the winter.

            I spent a lot of time trying to back up files with my new DVD burner. Maybe I’ve just been conditioned by a childhood of dealing with big solid appliances, but the external DVD burner seems extremely flimsy to me. It’s not much bigger than a DVD case and I’m always afraid that I’m going to break it when I’m loading or removing a disk. The Nero burning software told me that three of my blank DVDs were not empty and so it wouldn’t burn files to them. I think the problem might have been though that I allowed Windows to format the DVDs each time before trying to burn to them, because when I tried not formatting one of them, Nero had no problem with it and so I was able to put the complete collection of Laurie Anderson albums and films all onto one disk. One of the disks that Nero refused, worked fine when I didn’t use Nero and just dragged all of my photos onto it, so I guess Windows 7 has its own burning software and I might not have needed to download Nero. I managed to back up all of my writing and several programs. I still had two of the Nero rejected DVDs to use for some more stuff after most of the important things got backed up, so I made one DVD of old radio shows and another of female French singers. I need to get another pack of blank rewritable DVDs but there’s probably less of a hurry now.

            The reading lamp that I’ve had since my daughter was still a kid seems to have finally died. For the last several years I’d had it mounted on a camera tripod so it would stay at the right height. I probably should look into another one before classes start. Maybe there are some good Boxing Week prices.

            I watched the 9^th episode of the most recent season of Doctor Who. There were creatures made from the sand that forms in the corners of our eyes when we sleep: Sandmen.