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Because Don was busy at school Friday night as Master of Ceremonies for “Family Fun Night” I was home with lots of free time. As I was browsing the various unknown programs array when you click “Start” next to the Microsoft logo, I found the “Disk Defragmenter” tool (although I doubt I could find it again). I thought, hey, good idea to defragment. That was about two hours ago, and it’s now at 42%.
What’s cool about this Disk Defragmenter is that it is moving files around that can happily be contiguous and save space. You can see the top row there before defragmentation. The bottom row is in process. All that white unused space is to the right now, and the contiguous blue is clustered together, using space more efficiently. It just needs some time to regroup and open up that empty space.
Defragmenting is what Inge and I talked about at lunch earlier Friday. Not about computers, but rather daily life. And we didn’t use that word, but it seems right now.
She was telling me how she had gotten sort of crusty (my word) with built up stuff (I won’t tell you what kind of stuff, since that’s her business if she wants to blog about it) and that she had spent some time putting her consciousness on it and “stalking” it. Then she found insights and connections in her readings that reaffirmed her life calling, and she felt renewed.
You gotta understand. Inge and I are pretty introspective. We’re perfect friends for each other.
This is the most stressful time of year in my job. Papers, records, mail, journals and books pile up, waiting for less busy days to read, sort and file them. Students get annoying, colleagues get annoying, the University gets annoying. I can let resentments build up.
Friday morning my friend Alek in Greece posted this great black and white photo of an old Athens restaurant with a huge window and high ceiling. Something about that high-ceilinged room ~ head space ~ reminds me of defragmenting. You’re out on the busy streets of Athens, you stop shopping and bumping into people and step into this cool space and drink a café. All that chaos from the street hovers invisibly above your head. Your solitary self settles and regroups.
It’s fairly easy to see the need to declutter my house - throw laundry in the hamper, clear off the counters and put the dishes in the dishwasher, pick the newspapers up off the floor. It’s not as easy to see when my computer files need to be reorganized. It’s even less easy to see when I need to defragment and open up some space in my own head, free of crapola and annoyances that like to add up. And I guess my point is that it’s probably more important to do it when I am stressed and busy than when I’m not.
Hey! The Defragmenting is done. The report says:
0 files fragmented (I guess it didn’t need defragmenting after all.)
I have 8,236 folders (all those photos).
I have 36% free space.
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