I  just finished reading a book called THE STORY KEEPER, by Lisa Wingate.  It’s a sweet story.  Relaxing.  With the gentleness that Wingate always brings to her stories.

I call myself The Picture Keeper, because I have ’em.  A lot of them!

Tuesday night my brother called to ask if I could round up some pictures of him and our family when he was a child and send them by Express overnight mail to his agent.  Why, you ask?  Because CBS Sunday Morning is working on a segment about him!!  How exciting is that!

I will let you know when it is going to be on tv.

Sure, I said.  I’ve been organizing photos for years.  I sort, I scan, I store in containers.  I have several generations of relatives’ pictures, thanks to my grandmother’s carefully labeled photo albums.  In fact, two years ago I’d separated a giant bin of my mother’s photos and assembled a box just for my brother’s childhood photos.

Not that there were a lot of those, because my parents didn’t have a camera and weren’t really interested in taking pictures.  Uncle Mac (our great uncle) had a Brownie camera he was very proud of, so I suspect a lot of our pictures came from him.  And from whoever took pictures and gave them to us.

So this morning, with my first mug of coffee, I searched through my computer to find photos that I’d already scanned.   This would be so easy!  I would just email them and not worry about going to the Post Office or Staples.

Or so I thought.  Because January 9th, Microsoft had updated my computer to Version 1709.  I’d lost my Start menu and my Edge browser.  I’d spent a long day trying to counteract it and failed.

I hadn’t realized that I could no longer open my photos.  The message “This app can’t open” appeared every single frustrating, infuriating time.  Unless it was a recent photo taken by my I-phone, I was out of luck.

I searched for and finally found a dvd of photos I’d made for my mother’s 90th birthday.  My computer wouldn’t open that either.

Or my videos.

Okay, I would hook up my scanner and start over.

Nope.  It wouldn’t deal with my beloved scanner, either.

Plan C:  I would go to my mother’s house and look for the container of photos that belonged to my brother.

Which I did.  I selected about fifteen of them, labelled the backs and headed to the Post Office.  I hated mailing the originals, but hopefully CBS will be careful with them and will return them.

Mission accomplished.  It should have been a simple thing, this rounding up of pictures, but technology failed me.  And a box of photos saved the day.  And the tv show!

So I will be calling a computer repairman this afternoon and I hope he will say, “I know exactly what you’re talking about it!  Bring your computer in and I’ll have it done in a jiffy!”

But in case that little fantasy doesn’t come true, I’ll be off-line for a while as my two-year old computer is restored to its former glory.

Wish me luck.  And stay away from Version 1709.

I took a picture of the picture with my phone.  Not bad!