I am so happy about this...

auriaephialia sent me a link to happy news - provincial ID cards (for those of us without driver's licenses) will be available in July.

At last!

Oh happy day.

When I think of the hassles I've had over ID through the years... this has been a long time coming.

I must write a note of thanks to my MPP.

Trying to reach my files...

Let me ask advice about a computer problem in Windows.

I have an external hard drive on which I keep folders of movies and TV shows. Normally the folder is set to "view details" and I have no problem with it.

Currently, it has reset to "view thumbnails". Since the folder is big, when I open the folder and it tries to look at all those thumbnails, it immediately crashes.

Is there a way to change the default view without opening the folder? How can I get in there again?

Not what I'd planned for my Friday night...

A few weeks ago I steeled myself to clean out one of my lower kitchen cupboards, which had become so messy I couldn't find anything in it, and it's the one that holds things I need daily, or many times a day. Pots. Lids. That sort of thing. I thought it would be a horrible job: it took about ten minutes, and it was easy.

Today I couldn't settle to read or study French, so I decided to organize one of the upper cupboards in the kitchen. Well! No ten minute job, that one. Four hours? Five? I found myself at one point pouring spices into little bottles and labelling them, a laborious job. All the more laborious because my normal labelling software had got discombobulated in the recent computer purge (don't ask) and I had to set the whole thing up again, and then try to convince the label printer that yes indeed, my instructions were for the right kind of label.

Ornery devil.

And I hope the mysterious bottle I labelled "teff" really was teff. And that the cannister of white powder that isn't flour or cornstarch really must be baking soda.

Somewhere along the way I also made banana bread, and froze it, for use when people are over. Maybe on a Tuesday.

I threw out some tea in flavours I don't like, with the argument that it was all probably stale, anyway. I have a nice bag of unopened stuff for the Food Bank. Why do I have two packages of mustard seeds? What recipe do I ever do which calls for which unground mustard seeds? Clearly I never made whatever it was, because the packages are unopened.

Remember the Fly Lady? One of her things is to say you should scrub your kitchen sink till it shines last thing at night before going to bed. She says it will give you a sense of satisfaction and pride, and you'll have accomplished something that day. I tried her programme for a few months¹ and concluded that having a clean and shining sink does not give me a sense of satisfaction and pride. It makes me tired, and I think, "Thank goodness that's over." However long I did it, I waited for that sense of pride to kick in, and it never did. So I had a clean shiny sink every night? Big deal.

You know what gives me a sense of satisfaction and pride? Writing a story, or even a drabble. Or reading a story or a drabble. Or... well, just about anything besides scrubbing my sink.

But tonight... it was kind of great to think that now I can actually find my neatly shelved and labelled spices when I'm in the middle of a recipe, and to actually know what nuts I have and where they are. And not to have shelves full of boxes of probably-stale tea that I didn't like even when it was fresh. So I've kept the Earl Grey, the Earl Grey decaff, the Orange Pekoe, the organic green, and a box of chai.

I even got energized enough to scrub the counters and floors - there was an awkward moment when the vacuum cleaning fell out of my cleaning cupboard and took most of the contents with it, but that's just one of the perils of housework.

~ ~ ~

¹ Or maybe it was only a week, but it felt like months.