Kathryn is pretty great because she invites us all to her house and throws dinner parties and makes an astounding amount of food (we are talking five kinds of dessert, people. Including one with Heath Bar bits). In all a lovely weekend complete with a mini road trip and pit stop in Fairfield, gorgeous weather, lots of deck-sitting and drink-sipping, delicious Giada food, blueberry pancakes, new sunglasses, and being treated to the beauty that is the downtown Hartford train station.

Separation anxiety

4,378.

That's the number of pictures I had saved on my computer, going back to freshman year of college. Sadly, my laptop is more than five years old and I'm pretty sure it's about to hit the crapper soon. It's at the point where the "You are running low on disc space on drive C" warning pops up approximately every 15 minutes, and it's been doing that for like two years.

So I know my pictures are, well, in peril. (Peril!)

That's why I have a fancy, high-capacity external hard drive where I have them all backed up. But even though they're backed up, I still can't bring myself to delete the files from my computer. I just am distrustful of the external hard drive because I'm not 100% familiar with the way it works and how it works to restore things once they've been backed up.

But yesterday I finally did it. I backed up all 4,378 photo files again and then I started deleting them from the computer. And now my laptop is running much faster, which is really nice. So I'm learning to trust little external hard drive and not imagine it being lost in a fire or a flood or me spilling something on it or stepping on it and breaking it or someone stealing it.

Here are a few last looks at 2003: