Another Birthday and a Home Movie

I am having one of those mornings, technology-wise. Olga woke me up at 5 a.m. and as it turns out, it's a good thing she did, because I've been doing nothing but wrestling with the computer since then.

Today is my birthday. Woo hoo! I am 58, which my friend Jennifer would describe as my mid-late 50's (as opposed to 57, which was my early-late 50's, or 59, which will be my late-late 50's). Dave has cooked up some kind of birthdayish plan for this evening but I have no idea what it is, other than that it involves a martini. Which is really all I need to know.

(David Schwimmer is also 58 today -- my celebrity birthday mate.)

In celebration, I thought you all might like to see what my very first birthday looked like, back in 1967:

At least, I'm pretty sure that's my first birthday. Don't I look like a one-year-old? And there's only one candle on the cake. (There's no sound, so do not adjust your speakers.) My great-grandmother gave me that stuffed dog and I had it for about 40 years, before it finally disintegrated into a plastic baggie full of sawdust. I don't remember that pink toy at all so it must not have lasted long, but I do have photos of me wearing the green outfit.

That's me with my dad in our backyard, with our first dog, Beans, in the background. My mom always said Beans was crazy.

Anyway, that home movie clip is what put me through techno-hell this morning. Some of you may remember that I had our home movies professionally digitized many years ago, and they were stored on a thumb drive and on CD. I thought, "Oh, I'll just trim the home movies video file in iMovie -- easy as pie."

Except that when I plugged the thumb drive into my computer, it didn't work. It appears to have died. And I had no way to transfer the CD file onto my computer because of course computers no longer come with CD drives (and haven't for about ten years). And apparently, in my great wisdom, I somehow failed to back up the video file on any other device.

I wound up playing the CD on our television and recording it with my phone. Ridiculous! I'm not worried about losing the movies -- I can transfer the file off the CD at work. But what a pain.

Anyway, in other news, I had another crazy busy day yesterday. I got to school about an hour earlier than usual for my interview with the 7th graders -- they seemed fairly uninterested but I tried to be mildly entertaining -- and then had a busy morning. I raced home for lunch to let Olga out, because Dave had an afternoon medical appointment and we didn't think either of us would get home until 5 p.m. or so, which seemed too long to let the dog languish on the couch. As it turns out, Dave got home early from his appointment, so that was all unnecessary, but oh well.

I spent a few minutes in the garden with Olga, trimming dahlias. The foliage has already died back on some of them, so after cutting them back I put them in the shed for winter. I was going to take them out of their pots for storage but maybe I'll just repot them in the spring.

And Olga wanted me to throw her Kong, which is a very good sign that she's feeling better. She carried it out to the garden and dropped it and barked. When I did throw it a short distance she didn't chase it, but hey -- baby steps!

(Photo: The "Beatles Cafe," which is actually called Helter Skelter, at the St. John's Wood tube station.)