March 1, 2021

In which Google sends me a warning

I'm embarrassed to admit how reliant I am on Google when it comes to storage. I keep all my photos, all my old teaching materials, everything...in that particular drive. It's just easy. I'm not held hostage to a device or the Cloud. Everything is tied to my emails (plural) instead.

I got an email last weekend saying that I was coming up on the max capacity of my free storage. Since I went to Google to avoid iCloud storage fees, I didn't want to start paying if I didn't have to.

Every photo I've taken since 2012 is loaded into my Photos. Periodically, I go in and clean out screenshots and whatnot. I do get lazy about it, obviously. 

So, I randomly picked a year in the sidebar timeline and went in to start deleting. 

I got 2015. 

I noticed I had a ton of recipe photos with like 15 pictures for one food item, when one had already been published on the blog long ago. Delete. I had lots...LOTS...of skincare selfies from when I was selling Rodan and Fields. DELETE. Lots of pictures that were doubles from Instagram or collages. D-E-L-E-T-E. 

It's embarrassing, really, how much time I had to spend doing this the other day. 

After spending time glancing through 2015, all I really came away with was that it wasn't a great year. 

Do not recommend.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

I can't even explain what was terrible about it? I didn't love the school I was working at...it was a stark contrast to the previous 4 years I'd spent teaching. Scott was gone for large chunks of time, including February-July and then October and November. I felt very unsure of myself in Colorado Springs. I never quite felt like I belonged there. Living on a 35 acre plot, I felt like we were constantly battling against nature too. Snakes, tumbleweeds, hail, floods. There were no fires that year, but those would come later on. 

And there were the fertility treatments. We did four cycles of Clomid between the end of 2014 and the end of 2015. Many people complain of Clomid making them sick. For me, it just made food taste bad. It took everything I had to put recipes on the blog that year, but I kept at it because it gave me a goal to achieve. I look at the food photos now and gag a little bit, remembering how things just did not taste good (to me...there was nothing wrong with the recipes I shared LOL).

Anyway, it's weird the way some years just kind of aren't great from beginning to end. They weren't all bad moments, obviously. Just overall, it falls onto the end of the spectrum as being a year that I just couldn't love. 

I think, truly, this is because 2014 was a really regrettable year (It wasn't all bad, it was just hard..I made a good friend, had some fun in Colorado, and learned a lot about remodeling a house that year. We also got Jett in 2014.) and I was determined to make 2015 look how I wanted it to look. It was basically the year I learned I had no control. 2016 was a full-deployment year so I just made do and was in survival mode. 2017 was the year *almost* everything went wrong and 2018 was stressful as could be but incredibly humbling and a gift, overall. 2019 was...whatever. 

2020 wasn't that bad! And unless you lost a loved one or a livelihood, it wasn't bad for you either.

2021 is fine so far. 

2012 and 2013 were my years of enormous personal growth, if you want to backtrack that far. 

My point is: I spent an hour scanning, curating, and deleting photos from 2015 last weekend and I really think it kind of ruined the whole week that followed. There's a legitimate reason why looking back into our own digital footprint or, don't even go there: looking through someone else's archives, is a terrible comparison trap that really should be avoided. 

Maybe I'll start deleting from 2016 next? I like to go to the pre-Wells days because I can't bear to delete even the outtakes of him. 

2 comments:

  1. I dread that Google is going to start limiting their space too... i'm going to have to go in weekly & clear out all the useless pics that automatically upload

    ReplyDelete
  2. You need a back up drive. That's where all my photos go.

    ReplyDelete

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