Sunday, September 21, 2003

Be Careful What You Wish For, A Lesson

And this morning I said to whatever higher power might have been listening that the only thing I wanted was electricity. Power for my son's birthday party at the climbing gym (which we got), power at the pizza place so we could bring in food (which we didn't get, but the only real consequence was that everyone ate too much junk and got hyper and had sugar headaches), power at home. Got that.

Tonight I tried to play a music vid I'd downloaded and my computer crashed. And would not reboot. Would not let me run system restore, would not boot into safe mode. I called Dell Tech Support and after an hour on the phone being walked through various XP restore options, was told my registry is irrevocably FUBAR. I have to reinstall the system.

I am going to lose two months of work, since like a fucking moron I haven't backed up since we got back from our trip. I should have backed up my drive the moment I got home and got power -- it had occurred to me, considering that I was cursing myself for not having backed it up to disc which would have allowed me to get at files while on the laptop at the trailer yesterday. But no, I was too greedy, too busy wanting to update and chat and see the fucking vid.

Moral: BACK UP YOUR GODDAMN HARD DRIVES! NOW!

Anyway, I spoke too soon when I said I was back; I can use the laptop when my husband doesn't need it but my computer is going to be out with the data recovery people while I pray desperately that they can at least get my work files and rough drafts of Serious Writing off.

So I bitched about losing the contents of my refrigerator; BFD, I have now probably lost all the photos of my kids I've taken for the past two months. I have lost all articles I've written, research for articles I've written and notes for articles I've written. I'm missing a load of mail that will now never get answered, sorry, and a couple of notes I really wanted to save. I'm missing drafts of fic and logs of fic written with other people and notes and one-liners and you know, putting it all in perspective, I don't really care about the $150 worth of food at all.

I'm sure I was supposed to have learned some important life lesson from all this. But mostly what I've learned is that I don't feel closer to the Divine celebrating Shabbat as it was meant to be, by candlelight, when I'm feeling cut off from absolutely everyone and everything else; that it's all well and good to remember that other people have it worse but that doesn't really make me feel any better in the midst of a disaster; and that no matter how good out-of-town friends may be, take away the computer and they just aren't fucking close enough.

I'm going to go quietly tear my hair out now.

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