Have you ever done something really stupid?...I feel fortunate that there have been only a handful of times in my life that I've acted in a manner so terribly witless that I felt horrified...either that or I have very bad recall...hmmm, come to think of it...
The first time I made a huge mistake was on a first date...I was invited to his home for dinner...after which I volunteered to do the dishes...
This was when I learned that dishwashers require special soap...we returned to his house from a movie, greeted by suds pushing their way under the back door...bubbling down the steps and running far out into the backyard...yes, I had used Ivory dish soap, blissfully happy to do my part since he had cooked...completely unaware, having never had a dishwasher myself, that you never, never, never use regular soap...and did I mention he had hardwood floors in his kitchen?...I could not have been more mortified...it's a wonder we ever had a second date, much less a relationship...
My most recent mistake of this magnitude was writing over all of the images I shot in Paris during the last 10 days I was there...yes, I know, incredibly stupid...and the worst part is that I overwrote my only backup file deliberately...so sure was I that I had uploaded the photos to a different computer...did I verify that?...heck no, I was in a hurry to create disk space...hmmm, remember that memory problem I mentioned?...
I finally decided this week that I would attempt to recover those files...it would be worth it, I told myself, if I could find the only images I had captured of Giverny...Musée Rodin...Musée de l'Orangerie...Musée d'Orsay...Hôtel des Invalides...l'Assemblée Nationale and so many more...
That was before I knew my recovery software would find all the images I've ever taken anywhere...and every thumbnail ever generated...a total of 59,834 files...and it wouldn't allow me search them for any meaningful data...such as creation date...and it would recover them without orienting them correctly so that every portrait-oriented photo appears in landscape view...
Yes, I've been slogging through them...about 2,000 a day...my head bobbing from side-to-side determining first whether it's an image from the Paris trip...and next whether it's one I already have from the first 20 days of the trip...and, finally, whether it's worth keeping...trust me, this is harder than it sounds...
What will I recover?...these are my two favorites so far...not because the images are great...because each time I look at them, I am transported back...to that very moment...to that feeling of amazement...of awe...of gratitude...
The water garden at Giverny...
Claude Monet: Nymphéas; Reflets vert (Waterlilies; Green Reflections) , Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, France