WORDS TO LIVE BY

Don't put off to tomorrow what you can do today.

I learned that lesson the hard way this week. I'm the editor of our community newspaper and the deadline for submissions was last Sunday. I spent the early part of this week checking the articles and preparing them for the paper. I sent them out for proofreading, and reformatted them. Everything was going along smoothly, so smoothly that I was tempted to bring them to the publisher early. But, a couple other members of the staff wanted to go, so I decided not to change the date.

I went happily along and took my time setting everything up. After all my files are together, I have to save them on a memory stick and bring to the publisher. Since I had four days I took my time and decided to wait to save to the memory stick until Sunday. BIG MISTAKE.

Thursday morning I discovered that I couldn't save anything in Word. I did what computer experts have long suggested. I shut my pc down for a couple of hours. When I started it up again...you guessed it. Nothing happened. Dead. My first thought was that everything was lost.

Fortunately, my son knows me very well. He signed me up for automatic back-up Carbonite.com (thank you, thank you Bill) and everything on my computer is backed-up.

I spent the better part of today accessing my newspaper documents and pictures and saving them on my laptop. Now all I have to do is sort them and, of course, save them to the memory stick.

Of course, now my next project of scanning my menus will have to wait until I decide whether to install the scanner on my laptop or wait until I get my replacement computer. I was so looking forward to working on them. I even bought more frames, mats and backing for them.

At least nothing was lost.