New Year’s Day is my birthday. I will be and amazingly young 64 years old. I may not have a blog entry on my birthday.

Sharon and I wish you a Happy New Year! May the year ahead bring you health, wealth and happiness. Health is always important and both of us are lucky to be in very good health with few problems in any given year.

Wealth! Well wealth is a tangible thing measured in possessions and money. It is also measured in intangible things which include happiness, love and friendship. Sharon and I are wealthy now, though we could use more money LOL (laughing out loud).

Happiness is accepting where you are today. If you can let go of yesterday and look forward to tomorrow, you can be among the happiest people on earth. Living in the moment brings happiness into your life. Cherish treasured memories of the past. Look forward to brighter tomorrows, but live today.

Today Sharon and I are having dinner with one of her girlfriends from 4th grade through high school graduation. We met  her and her husband for dinner last year also. This will be New Years Eve, my birthday celebration and dinner with friends all rolled into one. We have no other plans.

Sharon has a paid account at http://classmates.com and this how her friend found her. Sharon has also been contacted by of few other friends from her school years. Classmates.com is a good place to find old friends from school, military friends and ????? They also have free registration, so you do not have to subscribe to their service. I have a free account and Sharon has the paid account.

I am late posting to the blog today because I was installing a new hard drive in my computer. I used up 109 gigabytes and installed an 80 gigabyte drive. Then I transferred files out of the old drive onto the new one.

Before I installed the new hard drive, I backed up my entire computer to an external hard drive. Do you back up your important files and pictures? If you do not, you may lose them ALL some day. This is especially true if you primary computer is a laptop. Laptops get dropped, stolen and abused more than desktop computers that never move.

The best backup program is backing up to an external hard drive on a daily basis. Even better is to back up two drives deep. This gives you two backups. One connected to your computer and the other alternated with that one. One of the backups should be kept in a different building than the other. Keeping them separate means if a disaster happens in one place, all is not lost.

I have a 100 gigabyte external hard drive, a 250 gigabyte external drive and a lot of important files backed up on CDs and DVDs. If my computer burned up or was stolen, I would still have all my family photos and business files available as soon as I hooked up to a new computer.