We woke up yesterday to a coating of white. It’s only the second time this year we’ve even had a hint of snow and it really didn’t amount to much. As a matter of fact, by the time 8:00 rolled around, it was pushing 40℉ and starting to rain. Then it rained…and rained…and RAINED! An inch had fallen by early evening and we were expecting another inch overnight.
When we have days and days of slow drizzly rains, it doesn’t seem like much of a problem until it pours. Then there’s no place for the water to go and it just sits in pools on the ground and runs off into the nearby creeks and rivers causing what is called areal flooding. Low lying areas are particularly prone to this kind of flooding. By 4:00 there had already been a couple of water rescues. People don’t seem to realize how deadly driving into standing water can be.
We were happy to be at home yesterday and not have to be out and about in that mess. I took advantage of the time and started doing some serious cleanup of my email inbox. I have outlook set up to receive email from several addresses and it’s been a few years since I made any serious attempt to clean it out. I have a habit of scrolling through emails on my phone and not deleting them as I go. So, I sat at the desk in our office for eight hours straight…deleting emails.
36,000 of them!
And that’s not all…there’s another 30,000 to go!
It’s much like cleaning out my mom’s house after she died. It would have been much faster to order a dumpster and just haul everything out at once and be done with it. But, there was no rhyme or reason to that house. There were precious family photos mixed in with junk mail in black plastic garbage bags. Her wedding band was in the basement in a box of jars and her engagement ring was in a shoebox filled with sewing notions and ballpoint pens that didn’t work.
I had to sort through everything bit by bit. Which is kind of what I’m doing with the inbox. Outlook has a great tool where you can “sweep” the inbox. Let’s say you regularly get emails from Sam’s Club. There’s nothing in those emails you really need after you’ve seen them so at the touch of a button, you can “sweep” all the emails from one address out into the trash. That makes it a lit quicker.
I also unsubscribed from at least a hundred sources which will cut down on the amount of email that comes in daily. This had just gotten out of hand and short of deleting the whole thing, I will devote some time to getting things under control. I’ll finish the inbox, then comes the FB friends list, then the great annual sorting of papers to start preparing for tax season.
AFTER Christmas.
I hope you all are safe in all this crazy weather!
❤️
“But everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way.”
1 Corinthians 14:40 NIV