photo project | here i am

Friends – I am taking a blogging vacation. I will miss you and hope you’ll join me again next week. Sometimes you just need to unplug.

Before I go, I’ll leave you with a story.

This morning I woke up at 5:30 am to work on my photo-storage-backup-elephant in the room before everyone woke up or needed anything from me.

I keep putting it off as you know and the elephant died.

I was moving the 3700+ photos to a safe place and before the migration was complete, an error message popped up. All of a sudden, my 3700 turned into 10. Where did they go?

Just lost.

Gone.

I was extremely sad for my loss, especially as I was trying to fix my problem.

I decided to try to recover. I went through the steps to recover a backup from iCloud. I followed the rules. I read help pages and sought advice.

But my elephant must be just too big.

8 hours later my problem is still not resolved. I felt many emotions. Sadness. Anger. Frustration.

As I sat with my frustration and tried to get control over it, I cleaned and organized everything else. That’s what I do when I get flustered and had a short temper. I get quiet and I clean. Weird. And I laugh when I should cry. And then I cry. And then I say so what.

So what. I mean, really.

They are photos and memories of the past. I’m holding on to the past and wasting the present moment. I hate that. Let it go, mantra, remember?

As I sat there feeling sad and mad at myself for not keeping up with my photo project, I thought of real loss and the families who died in the airplane accident this week, and all the other real pain that people carry. This is nothing. It’s just a little something.

I am walking away from the problem for today as I had enough.

Despite the chaos of life, I always look for the silver lining and there were several today.

My sister was texting me throughout the day and “listened” and supported me and reminded me to breathe. Thank you. I love that you get me.

My kids were so patient when our expectations for the day changed. Even though they had lots of questions, and were waiting, they were helpful and got it even though they thought I was crazy.

My husband is my rock. He went and got lunch for everyone. He helped with the technical solutions, even though he doesn’t really want to be family tech support. When I wanted to give up, he offered another idea and took me to his office where the wifi speed is faster than our home. He didn’t give up on me, even when I wasn’t so nice. I really like you. Thank you.

After nothing was working, I finally chose to give up. We got back in the car with the kids, and I just sat quietly in defeat.

As I sat still, I let go. We have places to be. I will deal with the elephant carcass next week.