Newton’s law of motion

Quick, can you cite Newton’s third law of motion? I bet you can, if you really think about it: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Although not exactly the same thing, but in the same vein, every action has a consequence. For instance, this morning I was washing my light clothes on the delicate cycle. Here it takes about 30 minutes for the washing machine to fill with water (I have no idea why, but it’s always been that way here in Brazil), so I checked everything about 45 minutes later as it was beginning the rinse cycle. I almost had a stroke. João’s nice white dress shirts were pink. For some reason my light pink dress, which had been washed before, bled into the white shirts, new linen handkerchiefs, and had turned my new blue nightgown to lilac. I had so few white clothes, I just threw them in with the light clothes. BIG mistake. Nasty consequence. Since, however, they were totally white items, there was a workable solution. Hot and messy, but workable. So I boiled water in a huge pot, put in bleach. (Remembering, of course, that it was about 95 degrees today). Stirred in the clothes and voilá. They were white again. I rinsed and spun them in the washer and all was right with the world. Of course, not even the dryer can take out those wrinkles from being crammed into the pot of hot water, so now I’ll have a nice ironing job ahead of me.

Secondly, Elly has pretty well convinced me to switch over to Windows 7. So reformatting computer,  here I come. Now this action, has really big time consequences. I finally had to get around to making recovery disks for the computer (only took 2 hours and 3 DVD’s), just in case it doesn’t work. I have just downloaded Windows Easy Transfer program and it should help me put all my documents and other such files onto my external disk. It took about two hours or so to transfer all my movies. Next stop, music. Then there is the backing up of all the settings on my browser programs. I also have a program that makes a list of all my programs installed on the computer, so that I can know what I will need to download and install after the reformat. And there are a LOT of programs, because I mostly work with freeware programs. When I think about reinstalling the printers, router, pendrives, external drives, telephones, I get tired. But I like a challenge… and hard work is the consequence. The last time I did a reformat like this I worked for about 12 hours straight. You can lose a lot of valuable stuff if you are too hasty. So everyday I am spending some time on backup. I intend to do a backup on the external drive and on some DVD’s, just in case. The Brazilian saying of “He who has two, actually has one” applies here.  When I analyze all this, I ask myself, why do I put myself through this torture? Ostensibly to save time, but I don’t think I’ll save any time by the time I do all this work. Maybe to have a more efficient computer. Maybe just to prove I can. I have always done well around computers, but recently I have felt like it’s getting harder to keep up with all the changes. That scares me. So to prove I can, I will. Like I say, actions have consequences.

Wish me luck with my actions and their consequences!