Yes, I know. Please don’t @ me.
Today Karma decided that R had suffered alone for long enough, and it was time I was also given some stressful, tedious and expensive nonsense to sort out, alongside all the other stuff I have to do. So. This afternoon I was backing up last month’s raw files to a dedicated external backup drive, and then moving them onto a different EHD, a task which involves shifting drives on and off the Mac because it doesn’t have enough ports for me to plug everything in at once. And all was well… right up till I plugged my working raw files drive back in, and it failed to appear in the Mac’s drive list. After trying several different combinations of ports and cables, without success, I took the drive down to H’s study and asked him to plug it into his Windows PC, which couldn’t see it either, and at that point my sinking feeling turned into actual nausea: the drive (or more probably its connection port) had died.
(By the way, I took an extra little kick on the ankle from Karma here, because over the years I’ve become slightly smug about the fact that, unlike many people I know, I’ve never suffered a camera SD card failure, and I’ve attributed this to the fact that I always upload my files from camera to computer by USB cable. In other words, I never take the SD card out of the camera and put it in a card reader, which I believe causes stress on the card connectors, and increases the likelihood of it failing. And yet, here I was, regularly plugging and unplugging EHDs from the Mac, even after I began to find that connecting the cable to the raw files drive had become a little bit tricky. Face: meet desk.)
I spent the rest of the afternoon reconstructing the contents of the failed drive on a different one from my backups, and delving into the Mac’s main Time Machine backup to cross-check that I hadn’t missed anything. Lightroom then decided to help, by listing every external raw file folder it could see as if it was on a separate EHD – at which point I began drinking copious quantities of red wine, and discussing my feelings with Adobe in fluent Anglo-Saxon. It’s probably lucky that I don’t keep a hammer in my study.
The TL:DR version of this, for anyone who doesn’t understand all of that rant, or (quite reasonably) doesn’t care, is: I had a horrible day, I haven’t yet fully sorted out the problem, I’m even further behind with my normal admin than I was this morning, and I am Not Happy. So I hope you’ll forgive me posting a male Plumpie stalking a potential mate, because witnessing this encounter gave me the best few seconds of the day. I smiled while I was watching him working a stealthy half-circle around her in the hope of perfecting his angle of attack, and then laughed when – after ignoring his approach so studiously that he probably thought she hadn’t noticed him – she casually dodged his eventual pounce, calmly flew to the next flower, and carried on feeding. Female Plumpies always come across as determined, efficient, and phlegmatic, and as I’m sadly lacking in all those qualities I admire them very much.
R: L2, C7, D14.
