Lessons Learned #MicroblogMondays

Let me take stock of what’s up with my life right now and share some lessons learned.

The death of two close family members – I told you about my aunt who passed away unexpectedly. Two days later, my cousin committed suicide. He was in his 30s, married a couple of years ago, divorced soon after and got into deep depression. And last week, he decided to end his life. The family is naturally devastated and feeling embarrassed to announce his death as suicide. Nobody can even begin to imagine how they are feeling right now as they perform the final rites.

This particular cousin’s family was one of our favorites in our rather large family. Right from my grandmother’s time, who was best friends with her sister-in-law, the whole family has been close-knit in spite of all the crap life has thrown at them. Long story and another post.

For now, I am trying to deal with the sadness that seems to settled on us, but naturally.

I am trying to take one thing at a time, which means:

My crashed computer – rather than fret over losing data, I simply decided to fast track its recovery by reformatting and reinstalling the OS.
My tummy bug – taking steps to heal
Work piling up – one thing at a time, of course.

As I set about resolving these, a step at a time, here are some…

Lessons learned:

Never save anything on the C drive. Instead, add a shortcut to another drive on the desktop and save things there. That’s a great tip, people!
Keep all installation discs easily accessible in a box instead of searching in various places.
Take screenshots of file folders and program files so you know what you need – everything is available online, but only if you know what you want
Use free cloud storage solutions like Dropbox, SugarSync, Google Drive and plenty more. Then you can access your stuff from anywhere.
Whichever browser you use – Firefox or Chrome – use the “Sync” feature which you can access from that top right corner. When you do that, you can safely reinstall your browser and restore all your bookmarks and other saved stuff. This is a big thing if you tend to have a lot of plugins, extensions and bookmarks
Reach out to community – the support is simply awesome. Even if they cannot directly help, they make you feel positive and believe everything is possible. Oh, and they make you feel loved.

Saved the best for last there, eh!!

♥

And now, the Write Tribe 100 Words on Saturday Prompt – where we had 20 solid quotes on writing and the prompt is to choose one of these quotes and write a 100 words.

Naturally, being a quote-enthusiast, I had a tough time choosing. I chose three, which completely sync with me. And so as usual, I’ll rebel by splitting my 100 words (or more) with these three:

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear – and devils, too.
― Graycie Harmon

Writing opens up the opportunity to be multiple personalities. I feel a sense of liberation exploring different genres and media. I enjoy writing about life experiences, sad stories, love stories, erotica, poetry and more. What a blessing to write for a living now! Those angels and demons keep me stimulated and smiling as I connect with words.

Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants.The market is fickle; the soul is eternal’.
― Jeffrey Carver

Enough said? As a blogger and a writer – I do not stress over recognition or traffic or comment statistics. I appreciate any that come for what they are, a big bonus. My reward is writing. Writing frees my soul and makes me happy.