where flowers bloom

My plan for this week was to get ready for Easter. I was going to make some gold speckled robin’s egg Easter eggs, start decorating the house, get my table ready and have fun doing it, and then share it with you. The only thing I’ve accomplished this far is the update of my letter-board.

Instead, I’ve spent countless hours at the Verizon and Apple stores.

While I type this post, on Thursday evening, I’m actually sitting at the Apple Genius Bar. I’m dealing with my Mac laptop and issues with my Photos library. Basically what happened, is that I lost all 49,000+ of my photos when I updated the operating system, late on Tuesday night.

I installed the update because I needed to back up my phone so that I could transfer all content from my iPhone 6S to a new iPhone 7. The reason I needed a new phone was that on the morning I was leaving for my NYC trip (a week ago Wednesday) my phone fell from my back pocket into the toilet.

I know, it’s the worst!

I put the phone in a container of rice to dry it out and carried that container with me throughout the two flights from Phoenix to Houston to New York. All seemed fine on Wednesday night when I arrived in NYC and pulled the phone from the rice. It was still working fine on Thursday and on Friday morning. Then, out of the blue, on Friday afternoon, the camera stopped working. I had no front camera for the rest of the trip, only the back “selfie” camera worked. Then, after a couple of hours, I noticed the screen also stopped working too.

The phone could not be fixed, so I spent all day this past Tuesday at Verizon, trying to back it up, to no avail. The Verizon dude told me to bring it home and plug it into my Mac and use iTunes to back it up…. hence the update of Mac’s operating system before the phone could be backed up.

The new phone is all good but the update of the operating system on the Mac somehow jacked up my desktop. Everything disappeared, so I brought the computer to the Genius Bar on Wednesday afternoon. They fixed that problem and I thought that my technology challenges were over… until I got home and found that ALL of my photos were gone!

Well, I do have most of them on an external hard drive, but I discovered that the last time I used the drive was in 2014. Oops!

So I’m back at Apple. I’ve been here since 4:30… when it was still light outside.

It’s now 8:00 pm and dark out. I’m still here. I’ve purchased a new, bigger, and better external hard drive because we found that the photos are actually still on the computer – in limbo somewhere. We need to get them off, onto the new external drive, and then put them back on the Mac. I’ve been told that it will take several more hours to transfer them all. Since the store closes at 9:00, I’m going home to try to finish the process.

UPDATE: It is now 1:25 am on Friday morning. All but about 5,000 of the photos were recovered before the Photos application quit and shut itself down. I feel OK about that for now. I’m happy to have the majority (more than 44,000) of my photos recovered. I’ll try to get the remaining photos back this afternoon. If I can’t do it on my own, I’ll be back at the Genius Bar.

Whatever it takes! I won’t let technology beat me down. I will be the victor of this challenging week!

It’s spring, flowers are blooming and I am full of hope AND perseverance!

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