Forty? Forty!

It's forty degrees out. When did we agree that winter could arrive a bit early this year?

Last night, I wrote a post expressing some surprise at the number of things we've bought, or planned to buy this week -- a backup drive for the laptop (on Friday, arrived yesterday); the washer and dryer (on Saturday, arriving tomorrow). We had planned to get a standalone freezer, tomorrow, because we somewhat need one -- my mother's freezer is fairly small, and ours tends to get swamped by the stuff that school fund drives offer. No one's making us buy that stuff, of course. And then we were thinking of placing an order for coffee from First Colony, because we're getting close to running out.

I deleted that post, because, on reflection, it sounded arrogant to me. Look how much stuff we can buy!!!

That feeling of arrogance had another, more substantial effect. We're going to back off on two of those purchases. We're not going to get the freezer -- at least, not for a couple of months, and possibly not at all -- and we're not going to get the coffee -- when we run out, we'll simply drink the plain stuff -- and at that, its not generic; its Starbucks. We're not going to adopt a policy of ascetic minimalism; we won't be wearing monastic robes, and I'm not getting a tonsure, even if I kind of look like I already have one. No, the reason is, I got a little skittish at the idea of spending so much money in one short period. That fear doesn't make economic sense -- we last bought a washer and dryer twenty years ago; we don't plan on routinely buying an external hard drive, or a freezer -- but it somehow makes emotional sense. I can't really explain it, other than to say that in some strange way, I feel as if buying a ton of stuff in a short period loosens the floodgates, making it more likely that we'll just go out and spend money later on things that we don't need, simply because we can. A new, larger food processor, when the one we have is just fine for 90% of the things we'd use one for. A new television, when the one we have is just fine. Even new books, when we haven't yet read the ones we bought two weeks ago. I don't like that idea. It feels profligate, out of control. Scary.

I don't actively worry about things like that -- but I do worry. It's part of my charm. (g)

This morning, speaking of the external hard drive, we were talking about the transience of digital items. It used to be that when you wanted to keep something, you squirreled it away in a folder or under your bed or in the attic; for the important stuff, you rented a safe deposit box and crammed it into there. And you knew that the odds were very good, when you went to look for it, it'd be there, and it'd be usable. If one of the things was a photograph from fifteen years ago, you knew there was a decent chance that it'd be somewhat faded now, but that was just what things like that did, over time. Similarly, you knew that if you went and pulled out that sheet of paper you'd put into a folder, it might be torn, or stained, now -- but it was still likely to be usable. Sometimes, you just couldn't find it -- where the heck did I put that thing? -- but that, too, was part of it. Things were, until they weren't.

But with digital items, there's always the lurking fear that though you thought they were safe, they weren't. Hard drives fail. Backup tapes stretch. CDs delayer (I thought they delaminated, but apparently not). Even if the storage media are intact, the software that knows how to read it fails, or won't run on the new machine. You don't have to relearn how to read in order to read that forty - five year old letter you kept under your bed, but the ten year old data? Maybe.

This isn't doing much for my confidence in backups, I can tell you. I almost -- not quite, but almost -- feel like saying 'Then what the hell. Don't back it up. It fails? It fails."