So I burned CDs last night. When I first bought a CD burner, some years ago, I'd intended to burn all my journal entries and pictures to CD, one for each year.

It was slightly ridiculous. 1999 - 2001 each took up less than 100M, and could've fit all together on one CD, but I burned an individual CD for each.

After forgetting to burn 2002's data for, well, a whole year, I gave in and combined 2002 and 2003 together on one CD. Of course, it was toward the end of 2003 that I got my new camera, with its higher-resolution images and correspondingly larger file sizes, so those two years took well more than half a CD.

But I didn't add up just how much larger the new images are until I went, last night, to burn my 2004 data. Last year's journal entries, including all the resized pictures: 6M. Trivial.

Blithely, I found the place where iPhoto had stashed my 2004 pictures (yes, I know you can burn pictures to CD directly from iPhoto, but not if you want to include other data on the CD as well) and dragged them onto the new CD...

...And was promptly rewarded with a snippy message about lack of disc space. Well, I know the iPhoto folders are full of extraneous data and thumbnails and such, so I carefully made a temporary directory and deleted all the extraneous stuff.

I still could only fit the photos for 2004 through September on the CD.

And then it occurred to me that I wasn't including all the movies I'd taken with my camera. So it works out - I'd do journal entries and photos through September on one CD, and movies and the rest of the photos on another. Problem solved!

Except that when I went to make the second CD, I discovered I was in for a bit of a shock. See, around Thanksgiving I'd increased the default resolution of my pictures from 1600x1200 to... I don't remember, actually. Something bigger. Because higher resolution pictures make better prints, and also afford more flexibility for cropping.

Correspondingly larger file size, and all that.

The December pictures alone were 450M.

And I had about 120M of movies.

So I have, in the end, three CDs of memories from 2004. Journal entries. Movies. And something like 1.2 Gigs of photos.

My cold is nearly gone, but it's turned into an annoying cough that tickles the back of my throat. I've been coughing so much and so hard today that I've got a stitch in my side.

And Matt was mocking me for not being sure yet whether I'd go to the gym. I'm proud of myself for even allowing it enough possibility that I brought my bag.

We've been letting Penny practice with a spoon lately. Though usually we keep a pretty tight rein on it - she gets one spoon, and I use another to mop up her spills and face after every bite. Mostly because I don't want to put her in a completely fresh outfit right after dinner.

But last night, I was feeling lax, and she wanted both spoons, and I thought - what the hell? It's only yogurt.

Well, um... They say yogurt is good for the complexion. I think. Don't they?

--Liz