A short break away in Knutsford afforded a first visit to Tatton Park, and a delightful look at some of the art and furniture there. The Wizard of Oz display was somewhat dismal, amusingly bad at times, but this was inconsequential. The house; its rooms, and contents were the stars of the show, and perhaps we wouldn't have thought to visit were it not for the Oz attraction. I'm grateful and feel blessed that friends games us the opportunity to stay.
Yesterday was spent, as all 31sts of December are, on my annual backups. This took all day. Each year I back up this and all blogs, my website database, Chrome bookmarks; then copy everything to three hard drives; one per-month, one per-quarter, one per-year. Then I created a Windows Recovery Drive (which takes at least an hour - amazingly slow). After that, deleting and filing my Gmail emails, which perhaps nobody on Earth does, but I like to have a record. Perhaps this is important exactly because nobody on Earth does this. In 100 years, I may be the only person with a record of important (not all, by any means) emails from the early 21st century. My email records are filed per-year and stretch back to Nov 2000.
Filing these in Gmail is not trivial. One must create 'Labels' per year, search 'newer:2016 older:2017' for 2016 emails for example, and label everything. Only then can that label alone be downloaded. I delete a lot of emails, generally everything that's too big (due to attachments), and after 1 year, all online order-type emails. Notifications are typically deleted rather than filed. Even so, each year has 50 to 100k of email, which is horribly wasteful, as the size of the text alone would be tiny and easy to manage. I wish Gmail would permit the deletion of attachments, but no. I wish Gmail would allow per-year filing, and an easy offline search (plain text?) of past emails; but again it does not.
I've spent today with Deb, watching the Vienna New Year's Day Concert. I watch a bit of this each New Year, but this is the first time I've seen it all, and all but 30 mins with Deb.
I'm now very tired after these busy days. I must make 2025 plans, but am already faced with many possibilities. For years I'd imagined 2024 to be a crucial and important year. It was not, apart from being my most difficult and strugglesome in many years. I can but fight harder. We are wind-blown leaves at the whims of fate, but we are in control of our attitudes towards it, if of nothing else.
