Time passing quickly

It's been quite a while since I've had a few extra moments to post.  Several days ago, HWMBO arrived from the States to join in my little Swiss idyll.  It seems as if we've hardly been able to catch our breaths since he disembarked from the plane.   It's not only the daylight period that is getting shorter; it seems like the days don't even have the 24 hours that they used to.  They have literally been flying by.   In another two weeks, it will be Halloween and the year will literally be hurtling into November.

One momentous - if traumatic - event occurred the evening after he arrived.  Our PC here, which was over ten years old, but still functioning, finally breathed its last.  While I was extremely happy that it waited until my very own network technician was on hand before giving up the ghost, I am still mourning some of the photos and other work that may be lost forever for want of a good backup.  Live and learn, I guess.  I still hope that one of my former IT colleagues may be able to retrieve at least some of the photos for me.

Of course, not having the PC was particularly problematic because I had embarked upon a major photo gathering project to celebrate my former boss's retirement.  The retirement had "officially" occurred at the end of August.  But because many of us who would otherwise have organized something were not here at the time, we managed to twist his arm enough so that he would free up some dates so that some of our former colleagues could get together to wish him well.

HWMBO was undaunted by the computer crash.  I was somewhat daunted myself - to say the least.  So we set off for the shops to see what could be done.  We ended up buying the cheapest PC that we could find.  It was a Packard Bell.  Cheap as it was, it works a thousand times better than the old PC and, in some ways, is even more state of the art than this laptop!  HWMBO, bless him, downloaded lots of free software and I now have a functioning PC again.  I was simply amazed at what software one can download for free!

Thanks to extremely helpful assistance from HWMBO and the wonders of Picasa software, we were able to crop, arrange and otherwise photoshop a presentation into being.  It was received to great acclaim on Wednesday, at the "official" celebration at our former headquarters.  We have now updated that presentation to include photos from all aspects of the last 30 years of my boss's career.  Those will be available for viewing at our final get-together next week.  Afterwards, we will give DVDs of the presentations to him and provide links to the Picasa albums that contain them to all who participated, or who wanted to participate but were too far-flung for any of our local celebrations.  I am still compiling a Snapfish Memory Book that will contain some of these same photos together with messages sent to me from several former colleagues who were not able to be present.

This is nothing short of magic, IMO.  Life is truly wondrous.  But the time still goes much too fast!