November's Peekaboo Moon

Who's that pale-faced fellow peeking out from behind those treetops? Why, it's the November full moon! Traditionally, it's called the Beaver Moon, Frost Moon, or Mourning Moon, but it will always be the Peekaboo or Tickle-Tickle Moon to me.  :-)

Please be on the watch for the penumbral eclipse that will happen quite early on Monday morning. I'm betting I won't be up for it, but I hope that somebody sees it and gets a few photos.

Also of note . . . in the continuing saga of my lost 2.36 TB Photos library that will no longer open, I ordered a 5-TB WD EasyStore hard drive on deep Thanksgiving discount on Monday night (I'd been looking for a 3-TB drive but the 5-TB one was about the same price!) and it arrived on Friday via USPS. I formatted it on Saturday and did the laborious process of copying over the Masters folder from my old Photos library.

Or rather, after finding the folders inside the Masters folder to be EMPTY on the injured library/hard drive, I made a copy from a BACK-UP of the old Photos library, from early March, before we left the office and went remote. I got out the back-up, which was on a twitchy 4-TB drive, and it kept disconnecting and re-connecting, which was annoying as all get-out. I changed the port on my Mac that it was connected to, and it stopped doing that.

I right-clicked on the library to see the files in the package. And then I copied the folders from the Masters file, a handful at a time, from the old 4-TB drive to the new 5-TB drive. Did you know that in the early years (2010 through 2013), the items were organized alphabetically? And so a few years went by this way: April August December February January July June March May November October September. Who knew?

I copied about 9 GB at a time, in 3- to 6-minute increments. I had a little timer with me that I kept setting so that I could go and do other things and then come back and copy more stuff. Clearly, it was a requirement that I BE HOME to do all of this. And so by the end of the evening - after about 11 hours of effort - I now have a copy of the Masters folder that weighs in around 1.34 TB. Apparently, when it comes to annoying, nitpicky, repetitive, high-attention-to-detail tasks, I'm your girl.

I do have some questions about exactly what I need to do to construct new photo libraries around these files. What I think I'll do next is copy all of the Masters folder items and split them onto TWO external drives, and make each one into a new photo library if I can. Wish me luck, of course, because I really don't know what I'm doing!!!!

Anyway, the important news is this: the masters are ALL THERE and I can SEE THEM. My photos - through March, at least - are still there!!! And you may recall that I was able to restore all of the photos I took since May because I kept the pictures on the camera memory cards, after suffering a catastrophic loss of an ancient memory card in the spring.

So, in the end, the only gap I may have is the March to May photos that were on the lost camera memory card. And the best of the photos I took during the gap time, including my Blips and my Facebook postings, would also have been exported onto my desktop, and possibly can be salvaged from there. So I finally had something I have not had in several weeks since disaster struck my hard drive: HOPE!

And so I finished my task, after 11 hours by the computer, and looked up to see the big, bad moon had broken free of the horizon and was sailing high above the treetops, free as a bird. Yes, free as a bird, indeed.

The soundtrack song is this one: Queen, with I Want to Break Free, live at Wembley.