Stress, thy name is "yard sale"...

If memory serves, the first time Galina and I did anything resembling a yard sale was when we lived in Jacksonville, Florida. One weekend, about a year and some months after moving to that city, my brother took me to a place on the west side of town where tables were arranged under several long structures consisting of a roof sitting on supports. It was as if a few hundred yard sales had migrated together, offering visitors a grand variety of bargains (this was back in the days before people started selling stuff at such places as a business, chasing out the individual yard-salers).

A few weeks later, Galina and I dragged boxes of stuff over there and actually did fairly well, earning enough money to pay a month's mortgage.

Here in Pagosa, Galina and I have been planning to do some kind of yard sale for quite some time, and have kept putting it off because (a) of the effort involved, and (b) the logistics, not the least of which is the fact that our driveway is long enough to eliminate walking up from the road as a viable option, and S-shaped enough to make it impossible to see if anyone is coming in your direction as you go up or down.

We solved the problem by setting up shop in a storage unit that we finally were able to "populate" with stuff by mid-morning. Sales were brisk, as our prices were pretty low, but that also meant we weren't rolling in the dough by the end of the day, either.

We both were ready to fall down into bed and into the arms of Morpheus when we got home, however.

* * *I learned yesterday that "backup," when applied to an iPod, refers to saving a copy of settings associated with the device and with various Apps. A number of people have reported various Apps as having disappeared as a result of their upgrade, but those may all be re-downloaded from the iPad's AppStore interface. The deal with media files haven't changed, either; they sit in the iTunes library.

And so, it occurred to me that, unlike some iPad users, I really don't keep a pile of data on my iPad (e.g., all of my contacts and my calendar (what calendar?). Most "data" that I found during slow periods of today's "unit sale" I was able to send to myself by email, which was most fortunate.

So, as I'm tapping out this post, I have upgraded my iPad to iOS 5. As I expected, no backup was made, which made restoring the data impossible. Right now, iTunes is about a quarter of the way through syncing my Apps, which reminds me that among the first things I should do once all the upgrade dust settles is to delete unused and rarely used Apps from my iPad.

But first, the dust has to settle.

I'm going to go watch some tube. I hope there's something on that's worth watching.

Cheers...

More iTunes fun... (not!)

For some reason, iTunes decided I needed to have my Apps spread out over 11 screens instead of 4.

So I just spent about 20 minutes moving stuff around to where I want it.

Whereupon iTunes crashed.

Still, I continue to deal with it, which means that the pleasure associated with stuff it does right outweighs the pain associated with stuff it does wrong.

Almost there...