back up your data, BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!

The new year came and went, and I spent the majority of January organizing all my data. Feeling very smug with my new back up hard drive and portable drives-I thought I had it all figured out. Figured out that is, until the portable drive crashed. It was less than six months old!!!!! Fortunately, I was able to recover it because I had not deleted the files from my hard drive. Duplicity is also the key. Anyway, if you are at all like me, beginning the foray into digital photography around 2006, your computer might be getting a tad old. If you are also like me, you have tons of photos on the hard drive of that old computer........hard drives crash. And if yours does, you wanna have a back up. Now Costco carries a seagate back up drive that is 1.5TB (terabytes). MOZY is another online solution. Do not count your photos backed up at such sites as Kodak or Snapfish as they reduce your images in order to store them. In addition to backing up your hard drive, you should always keep a copy of your "digital negatives" in a separate file. This file is like your negatives from the old days. That way you always have a pristine copy of your images (and if you are backing up, two pristine copies).

cookies and snow

HOORAY!!!! We finally got our snow day today. So far about 8 inches of fluffy white stuff has fallen with more on the way. I love that feeling when you open your eyes in the morning knowing, that while it is Wednesday, for all purposes it is a Saturday! We started our day off with fresh roasted coffee-yum! Then moved on to cap'n crunch french toast. From there we played rounds of wii resort and then the kids went outside to play in the snow. While outside, I decided to mix up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. They sounded soooo delicious. A little dough for me, a little cookies for the kiddos. Well, searching frantically in my pantry, I could not locate ANY brown sugar. After deciding not to make some OTHER cookie, I decided to google "substitutes for brown sugar". You gotta love google. Sure enough, the recipe to "make" brown sugar was revealed. It is approximately for dark brown sugar one cup of granulated white sugar mixed with just under a 1/4 cup molasses. It was delicious....and fresh....and made the most delicious choc chip cookies EVER!!!!!