This is the bridge at the Train Station in downtown Montgomery. I recently had to go downtown for a Saturday meeting, and when we were ready to leave, it had started raining. Jennifer and I stopped at the top of the parking deck long enough to shoot several pictures, then headed home.

You never know where you’re going to find a good picture!

In south central Alabama, where I live, it’s very unusual to have snow, much less enough to shut down schools, businesses and roads in the area. But that’s exactly what happened on Friday. We got about 4 inches of snow altogether, and it was beautiful!

Three of our granddaughters and their dad made a snowman in the front yard, threw snowballs and tasted snow. I hope they made lots of good memories because they may not ever get another chance to see this much snow. I only remember two other times like this: the last time was in 1993,  and snow piled up in drifts everywhere; some ditches had snow for a week afterwards.

The only other time I remember was in the mid-70s.  Snow was 7 or 8 inches deep on top of cars and everything was covered. My dad’s parents, who always seemed very strait-laced to my brothers and I, actually got out and built a snowman with us – they had never seen snow.

It was fun to act like a kid again- I’m glad I live in a place where commonplace miracles like snow can make such a huge difference in my day.

My computer got into a mess a couple of weeks ago- some malware installed itself and started messing with my browser.   When I searched for anything (no matter what search engine), any search results I clicked on took me to another search results page from a third party advertising company. I  ran Spybot Search and Destroy several times, and each time it would remove some things, but the problem wasn’t corrected.

After getting the Blue Screen of Death several times, I decided to re-install XP. This meant re-installing all my programs, which I’m still working through.  I was able to use my Ubuntu Linux partition during  the time my Windows partition was down, so I wasn’t  offline, I just had work to be done, and some things required specific software.

I’m finally back on XP;  some lessons were learned this time. First, I was glad I had backups of all my documents. I actually save all my working files on an external hard drive and put backups on my C drive. I didn’t lose any files this time, but it’s made me consider having an offsite backup, maybe one of those online backup service.

I need to be more diligent in learning software available through Linux-  GIMP is a great substitute for Photoshop, and there are Illustrator-like programs, but I haven’t found anything yet that works for In Design files. I also need to figure out how to get more fonts installed in Linux; I’m sure there has to be a way to do this, just haven’t pushed myself to learn it yet. I’ve been saying for years I’d love to move completely away from Windows, but so far, it hasn’t been a top priority.

One lesson I have learned- always try to learn something from any failure or challenge; and stay positive. Negativity doesn’t help at all, and brings on more frustration.