A Trip Down Memory Lane- Email Style

This is no fairy tale, there will be no pretty pictures as part of this post, just a good old fashioned, entertaining story.

A little over 2 weeks ago, right after returning from beadfest, I herniated a disc in my back. ( I'm OK, thank you)

But it involved a trip to the ER, then the primary Drs. for a referral, then for an MRI, then another Dr. then another Dr. you know the drill.

In the meantime, all the plans I had for coming home from the last of the roadtrips and scheduled events and getting down to some heavy duty spring cleaning, organizing and creating, have been waylaid.  For now.

So sitting here I decided, well, I could clean up my email, my inbox hasn't had a good clearing out in awhile.

I'd Say!

Apparently the last time I did it was in the fall of 2010, yup, a year and a half ago. Just where did THAT time go exactly?

As I started to scroll and click and scroll and click, occassionally an email would catch my eye and I would re-read it and smile. Oh yeah, i remember that now.

It was interesting to see the progression of things I had ordered, classes I had signed up for, reservations for hotels I would stay at for art gatherings, all the friendly emails for the networking that intensifies as such events get closer. All happy memories brought to mind.

Interspersed between all these fun things are all the daily notices we sign up for, jewelry making daily, beading daily, ceramics arts daily,  the thought for the day etc. Some of which we don't delete right away because while we don't have the time right now, there is something there we want to come back to. Problem is, by the time we get back to our computers again, a gazillion more have flooded our inbox, but we are eternally optimistic, so save on we go.

There are renewal notices for websites, accounts, subscriptions, all that need to be checked on before proceeding and deleting

Then there are the things we save that have sentimental value, thoughts from people we can't seem to part with and hit that delete button, not yet anyway.  The pictures that have been sent to us that we didn't have the time just then to save to a folder, still waiting. 

Links we have been sent for items of interest that we really need to go see, just not right now.

Then of course there are the business info emails with pertinent info we can't lose,  reset password confirmations that we're not sure we wrote down yet, pricelists, instructions, copies of invoices that we need to print and sometimes even after they've been printed we forget to delete the email.

We have the run of the mill order confirmation , shortly followed by the shipping confirmation email, occassionally followed by the delivery confirmation email all of which we keep until we get the item safely in our hot little hands and know it's finally Ok to delete all of the above, only trouble is, now all of the above is buried somewhere out of sight amidst a slew of other like emails, which, we just don't have the time to look for now, maybe later.

I have to admit, there were some funny moments as i scrolled and deleted, one of which was an email I received from a dear friend,( you know who you are) telling me how she had just returned from a metalsmithing class of a sort and the instructor had this cool small tabletop belt sander that they were able to use in the class and how she loved it, ordered one and said i needed one too. The next email below it was date stamped exactly 32 minutes later from Harbor freight, an order confirmation for one small tabletop belt sander. That made me laugh.

I was sad to see that I had ordered some supplies, clay, glazes, tools, a full year ago, that i needed for a burning project that I have yet been unable to get started with.

It was kind of interesting to go through the past year and a half through the emails, marking the time and sequence of events like some unintended journal.

I clicked for so long my wrist and forearm cramped several times and I had to pause but I was determined to get this done. At one point I thought "well, I must be getting down there by now" only to look and see I was still over 4000 messages. 

At another point I was deleting so quickly everything came to a halt and the toolbar on the top said "not responding" Oh no buster, if I can do it so can you !

After a little over 2 hours, I had finally pared it down to what you see above, 58 messages, of which I decided to keep a little while longer, you know, just in case.

And this is what the deleted file looked like- 7105 messages.

AAAhhhh, almost done,  hit the empty deleted items folder and get

"Are you sure you want to permanently empty the deleted items folder?"

Now if you're like me, this will give you pause, am I sure I really don't need anything in there?

What the hell, let's live dangerously, click.

I checked just to make sure it all went down and this is what greeted me. Isn't that lovely?

What was that noise??????

Oh never mind , my computer just burped.

Now go leave me a message so I have something to read!