Housekeeping. Somebody's Got To Do It...

Boys sweeping the walkways at Doi Suthep, high above Chiang Mai

Household and other care help is far more affordable where your home currency carries a bit more weight; something not lost on those nearing retirement age in the USA, for sure. Here it's terribly dear, as one of my British friends would say.

Many of you probably know someone who's had to make the choice between going into a less than desirable assisted living home here in the West or moving to a country where help was more within their set financial means - assuming such a move was possible, of course. Mexico has become a "ride it out" destination for some, the Philippines for others, Thailand for still others.

Thankfully I'm not having to face that decision just yet. Hell, I'd be happy to just have a housekeeper come in to do the basics like dusting, vacuuming and the laundry every so often. As it is, all such details fall to me. I've tried adopting Quentin Crisp's view on dusting - "After three years it doesn't get any worse," - but being somewhat of a softie I catch myself naming the dust bunnies under things and then I feel bad about sweeping them up. That was a joke just then, by the way. 

Computer housekeeping isn't a difficult thing to do, assuming I pay attention to what I'm doing so I don't make major errors while moving, backing up and deleting redundant files.

A friend in Bangkok who knows better (he's a networking specialist for a huge shopping complex) was watching a football match while helping me one time and mistakenly deleted two week's worth of my images from that particular trip. I was beside myself, but managed to smile weakly and joke with him about it, saying "Bad dog! No cookie!" but in truth I wanted to throttle him. The poor guy truly felt awful about losing the 1,000+ images, but once they're gone, they're gone. [Save your breath - I know there are ways to recover many things like this, but I wasn't prepared to go through it].

...and what the deuce does all of this have to do with today's post? Simple, really: I've been shifting things to the new external drives, and time's just gotten away from me. Back tomorrow, Great Silicon Lords and technology willing.