Someone Lost Her "Life" Last Night

Wednesday I got the genius idea to sync my Google calendar, which I haven't really used since I went back to Outlook in May of 08 (because my stoopid smartphone wouldn't sync to my puter without it at the time), with said Outlook so I could keep track of everything. I synced my phone, first, as a test. Worked like a charm, woot!

Got home and, because the phone experiment went so well, synced it in a 2-way sync with my Outlook. Fine, sorta... Except for the bajillion duplicate listings on the Google cal that were defaulting to my old primary calendar on Google---which was used for business deadlines and color-coded accordingly.

I started sorting them today and got impatient with how long it was taking. I thought hey, Google has it all. I'll 1-way sync to the puter then clear out Google so I can change my primary calendar, then 1-way sync it back from puter to big G. A sound plan, right?

Yea, I've blocked out the deets, but basically I managed to wipe both calendars.

But I hadn't synced my phone since yesterday, so I still had a lot of stuff there, at least since May 08. I'd just sync the phone BACK to Google to restore it and give up on the Outlook calendar since it's too hard to share... Yea, not so much.

The sync wiped my phone calendar, too.

Now I have no past for, oh, the last five years or so of my life...

No big, theoretically... Have to reprogram birthdays and J's funky school schedule, a PITA but not the end of the world, right?

Not for me. I measure time by events rather than the calendar itself. Without a record of those events I lose time. Essentially I lose memories. Pre-electronic calendars I kept paper datebooks, and I have these in the house going back to high school. (Should I mention my 20th reunion is coming up soon?)

I flip through those things and remember little precious moments I would otherwise forget:

• The first time we left J's older sister with a sitter.
• The day of J's first day of Kinder.
• The anniversary of joining my mom's group--where I've made the best, and first, real friends of my adult life...

It could get to be a ridiculously long list if I let it. All gone.

The only reason I haven't torn out my (rapidly greying) hair yet is that I am slow to move forward. Meaning that I haven't gotten around to wiping the hard disk of the old laptop I replaced in February of this year. Meaning that the Outlook on that one still has most of the last five years of personal & professional milestones.

Google is wiped clean, and since I took tomorrow off I can spend the day syncing Google to the old laptop and fill in the blanks from there.

And Outlook's calendar function can friggin' bite me.