Kitty Update, and Compy Cleanup

So Nombly is back home safe from the vet. He just had a checkup. His heart arrhythmia is kookier than ever, but it doesn't show in his every day run-around activities. We could go see a heart specialist, who can adjust his meds or add new ones, but that won't guarantee he'll get better. Nombly has seen a heart specialist in the past, and she was great--and worth it, because he's stopped having the seizures he used to have. But it's expensive, and this time we'd have to go much farther to see her. I think this time we're just going to keep him on the present meds, and wait until something goes wrong before we go tossing around the money. My hope is that he'll be madly dashing through the apartment one day, and drop dead. But sadly The End is usually long, painful, and filled with upset and doubt about what to do. Sigh!

But no ending yet. :-)

He was his usual Good Boy self at the vet. Not one meow, and remaining as calm as one can expect for his blood test. Of course, now we have the Crisis in the Meowee East to deal with, as usual. Poor Sherry has very sensitive smell, so bringing Nombly back from the vet makes him think we've brought in a new cat. He must think that about once a year we bring in a new cat who looks like Nombly, and we call him Nombly, but isn't Nombly... just to screw with Sherry's head. So they have to be kept separate until Sherry adjusts--about a day or two. But Haley also has to be kept away from them when we're leaving Sherry around Nombly, because if Sherry gets all "Ah! A Stranger!" he will growl and hiss and get all slinky, and then SHE starts growling and hissing, and then we'll have a major cat fight on our hands. To be avoided at all costs.

But right now everyone's asleep and quiet. My little kitties.

This weekend I'm doing fashion research, and cleaning up my computer and hard drive. It's really not procrastination, because I have little space left on either. The main problem is that the library of music on my laptop, and the one on my hard drive, are not perfect mirrors of each other. I'm trying to clean up, and get them to match, without accidentally losing any music files. Each one is 30+ GBs, and that's after I already cleaned a lot of crap out of them.

Luckily I found a program that can seek out files that appear to be duplicates of each other, even if they have different names (one of my problems), and even if they're in different folders (my other problem.) So now that I've cleaned up each folder a bit, I'm merging them, and then I'll run this program and get down to ONE master set of music. And then copy that back to my laptop (erasing the music that's still there), and then I'll clear out my iTunes player and reload the whole damn thing (or re-match them, if that's possible, so that I don't lose my playlists.) And then I'll have to decide if there's some music I don't want to keep on my laptop, but only on my hard drive, like Christmas music, to make space.

I also need to re-do a complete backup of my computer. (I've had to delete my old backup, to make space on the HD to merge the two libraries--but it was pretty old anyway.) I keep backups of what I consider my most important folders--MY WRITING!--but I need to get back to regularly backing up the whole show. So that will be next.

THEN I need to run some repair programs and really clean up the computer. But I won't do that sort of thing until a backup is back in place.

I enjoy doing this sort of thing... I'm all about the organizing, provided I have time. And music. As long as, whatever I'm doing, allows me to play iTunes at the same time. (Right now it's Metallica.) And I work on my fashion research at the same time. But maybe tomorrow I'll move everything to the living room and watch my dvds while I work at the really long stuff. ...And keep peace in the Meowee East.

My Current Useful Program Discoveries:

* backup program my dad mentioned
* a wee program that removes associated files when you delete applications
* a program that shows you what's taking up the most memory, in case there's something in there you didn't know about (Eg. I found some Garageband crap I'd missed when I deleted Garageband... because I didn't have the previous program when I tossed it!)
* a general cleanup/fixit program which I haven't used yet
* and my beloved Mr Clean, who cleans up duplicated files

(the latter 4 came from this article)