House Cleaning and Chocolate Pudding

I cleaned yesterday...but not what I meant to clean.

Well, yesterday I wanted to get some more closets cleaned out and a cupboard or two. But instead, I sat at my big computer and worked on cleaning it out. I sat here from noon until 9:30pm last night, with just a couple hour break to take a shower, to make Dad some homemade chocolate pudding (Recipe below) and to go visit him while it was still warm. He loves that stuff with whipped cream. I made the pudding diety so I could have a little bit too! We ate it with sugar-free CoolWhip. He never knew the difference and Andy even loved it.

Anyway, I had tried to run a defrag on my computer this weekend and it said I only had 2% of the disc space left and that wasn't enough to run an effective defrag. I ran one anyway and it didn't really do much good. I decided it was time to do some housekeeping on this big old thing! I sat here for a total of 7 1/2 hours yesterday deleting old photos and files.

I have a Canon Rebel camera and it can take photos up to 2.84 megabytes each. I deleted somewhere around 15,000 photos and files (mostly photos) and gained back 25.1 gigabytes of space! And just so you don't think "wow, did she delete important photos?" I have to tell you that they were all duplicates or photos taken with the machine-gun button on my camera (I don't know what it's really called, do you?). In other words, I point at one rose and take 10 or 20 shots in a hurry of the exact same view. For some unknown reason, I kept them all!! Obviously my computer was the dumping ground for my camera's memory card. Well, hey, when you have 75 gig of space on your computer, you never dream you'll fill it up!! My documents folder had over 31,000 files and photos in it and it was a total of 48 gigs of space being taken up by that folder. For one folder, even a master folder, to be that full...well, it's just unheard of and totally unnecessary! I saved one of everything and all the important family, holiday, vacation and artsy photos and I even found pictures buried deep from a long, long time ago of a couple of you guys, from rose forum days!!! I saved them too but dumped all the rest. And before you get worried that I'm a stalker or something, I got in the habit of saving forum photos because someone was always asking me to post a photo of them and it was easier than having them email them to me. So I just saved friends photos.

Anyway, that all amounted to 24 gig...then I ran a defrag again and got back another 1.1 gig. For a grand total of 25.1 gigs of recovered space. Then I ran the disc cleanup tool and got back even more from old temp files being dumped. Boy, I hadn't done that in ages. I went from having 2% of my computer space left to having 34%. That's more like it. My computer still isn't running the greatest, but it's sure faster than it was. It's usable now and that's what I was aiming for!

Have you defragged your computer lately?

Homemade Chocolate Pudding Like Mom used to make

This pudding recipe came from my old old Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. You know the kind with the red and white gingham cover? This is one of my Dad's favorite desserts, Mom used to make it for us all the time when we were kids. It's so easy and really a treat! I added my diet ingredients to this recipe...they weren't in the original.

Chocolate Pudding

1/2 cup white sugar or Splenda
1/3 C. Cocoa
3 Tbsp. Cornstarch
1/4 tsp. Salt
2 1/2 C. Whole milk or Skim milk
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla

In a heavy sauce pan mix the sugar, cocoa, cornstarch and salt together well. Gradually blend in milk. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture thickens. Cook 3 minutes more. Remove from heat and add vanilla. Let cool a little and serve warm with whipped topping. Homemade with real whipping cream is best, but Cool Whip will do. This serves 5-6 normal people or 3 if you love it like Andy and Dad do and one of you is dieting and eats only half a serving!

And you wondered what in the world house cleaning and chocolate pudding had in common!