I had a computer crisis during the week. Thunderbird, my email program, suddenly stopped working. Chris patiently spent an afternoon sorting the problem out, and in the end installed a new program, Opera, instead. Opera happily uploaded the 30,000 emails in my archives. 30,000?!? I couldn’t believe it. Now, there do appear to be two copies of every email there, ones I’ve sent as well as those I’ve received, but that’s still a heck of a lot of emails. A ridiculous amount.

So I’m getting e-organised. I have unsubscribed from a lot of newsletters that I simply didn’t look at any more, but was too lazy to do anything about. Which was pathetic, since it takes about thirty seconds to go through the unsubscribe procedure, if that. I’ve also permanently deleted a lot of old emails. I actually thought I’d got rid of them, but they’d been sat in cyber limbo somewhere, waiting to be either summoned into existence again, or debyted or devirtualised or whatever the term for obliterating an email is. They’ve gone for good now.

I’ve also lost one of my email addresses altogether, but that’s done me a huge favour as it’s the one I tended to use to sign up to things with overzealous enthusiasm, such as Google Alerts. I had totally overdone those so will restart, possibly, in a much more civilised fashion. I’ll wait a few days first to see if I can live without them.

My e-organisation doesn’t stop there. I’ve accumulated 162 posts on this blog now, and they’re starting to add up on Books Are Cool too. I was getting to the point of not being sure if I’d written about something before. True, there’s the A-Z index, but I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d covered in the less precisely named posts such as ‘Wired’ or ‘End of a Revolution’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Nodes and Nudes’, for example. So, my inner indexer emerging again, I’ve compiled a cross-referenced record of all my posts and what they’re about. I used a small répertoire – address book – to do it, and a couple of highlighters, and I’m very proud of the end results. It’ll help me stay on track and not repeat myself too often, all being well.

Vendredi Saint – Good Friday – today. Caitlin, the Chef in Wellies, is rustling up some hot-cross buns as I write. Those are essential Easter eating in our household. As is chocolate, of course. I have quite a stash waiting for Sunday. And our last 2010 turkey, in the freezer. (This year’s batch arrive next week. I’ve gone for three whites, three blacks and three bronzes (grises).) So there’ll be turkey gobbling to add to the other animal noises at the farm in the very near future.

Daily snippets for 22 April

Today’s saint: St Alexandre, martyred by crucifixion in 178 at Lyons.

Famous French person born this day: in 1766, Madame de Staël, writer

Famous French person who died this day: Antoine de Jussieu in 1758, naturalist

Today’s words: une dinde – turkey; un dindonneau – turkey poult (young turkey): un dindon – male turkey