So it took three adults around seventy-five minutes to get one sugar saturated elephant to bed tonight. Bub pulled out all his stops, finding every excuse to come back downstairs. He had to kiss daddy again. He needed to go potty. He needed to hide the Halloween candy from trick or treaters (this after some loud-knocking and tardy trick-or-treaters got his attention), and then he needed to ask me to make some signs. One sign was supposed to say, "No more candy. This candy is for Bub." The other was supposed to say, "Go to a different house." I promised him to make both signs, but it was still thirty minutes until he was settled. I haven't made the signs yet, but I may go with the alternate plan of telling Bub that mommy and daddy hid the candy really well so that no one could steal it (not even Bub!). Just an idea.
I've got lots of cute Halloween photos of our elephant and our alien/sea monster (still not sure what to call Little Bit's costume--the only one for toddler boys left on the rack at Children's Place last week--unidentifiable, but 50% off, NTB). I also have plenty of details to report about our various holiday happenings -- moldy, moldy pumpkins . . . a gas-leaking generator that shut down the bouncy castles at our neighborhood's Halloween fest last weekend, prompting many tears and a visit from the fire department . . . Little Bit's confident belief that he is a "big kid" now as he raced down the street after his costumed big brother . . . a preschool Halloween party where the temperature was around 95 degrees inside.
These posts would all be better with pictures. The pictures are all on my camera. I would upload them to my computer, but I can't because my computer seemed to die on Tuesday morning.* When I turned the MacBook on, all I saw was a grey screen and a flashing question mark superimposed on top of a file folder. Not encouraging.
We knew the laptop was on its last legs and had even begun strategizing some solutions and a potential new purchase. All week I held out hope that when we took it to the Genius Bar on Saturday, they would at least be able to recover my data.
Alas, no dice. The hard drive was completely shot. Who knows how. Who knows why.
The good news is that most everything that matters is backed up elsewhere. Some photos on our separate hard drive. Some on Kodak Gallery. Music on the hard drive upstairs and on my ipod. All my important academic stuff and dissertation on a remote hard drive storage system thing that I subscribe to.
I've lost some personal writing that I might miss a little, some recipes I typed up, a list of all the books I read in 2009, and a bunch of little stuff, most of which I can live without or won't ever remember having.
I'm okay about it, except when I think about the loss of the hundreds of pictures that we have taken using the Photo Booth feature of the MacBook. We started taking these photos when Bub was about seven months old. Sometime last year, he learned how to take them himself. I always wanted to do something with these little shots. A bunch of random glimpses of life as we really live it every day. My heart hurts quite a bit thinking about three plus years of this kind of photo history lost. But, we can start again when the Photo Booth is back in business. We can capture the moments when Little Bit learns how to take his own photos. We can try to cram the whole family into shots when number three joins us in April.
How do I know the Photo Booth will be back in business? Because even though my warranty and Apple Care extension plan had both expired, Apple is still fixing my computer. Our genius today, Rich, came back from the secret back room at the store and gave us the bad news that all that protection stuff had expired, but then said, "But we can cover those repairs for you." So I say, "Do you mean 'cover' as in you know how to fix it, or 'cover' as in you are fixing it for free?" They are fixing it for free. Seems my MacBook was not the only one to have this kind of problem, which kind of pissed me off in the sense of "Hey, could you have emailed me a warning so I would have been a good girl about backing stuff up." But mostly, I thought, "Woo hoo!" They are giving me a new hard drive, double in size from the old one, and promised to fix my wonky, child-damaged space bar to boot.
I can pick it up tomorrow.
In honor of this good news and despite the fact that I have been the worst poster in the world lately, I'm thinking of participating in NaBloPoMo, which is National Blog Posting Month. If you sign up for it, you commit to posting every day in the month of November. I'm going to give it a try. Some of the posts will surely be crap, but I need to get back into the habit of making time for blogging.
Please stay tuned. Also, go back up everything on your own hard drives RIGHT NOW!
*I will add that this past Tuesday was already shaping up to be a pretty tough day when that occurred.
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6 comments:
Woo-hoo. I am very excited at the prospect of a new blog post every day in Nov! Also very impressed with all the backing up you had done. Our 2003 pc is on its.last legs and I need to be more diligent...LAP
We lost our network harddrive a couple of months ago. It was supposed to be a mirrored backup, which means all of the data was in there twice, but somehow it all went bad. Or so we thought. Luckily, Neil was able to recover the data and we got a new hard drive, but it was a scary couple of days when I thought that we had lost ALL of our photos. Sophie's birth and our entire life since then. We have since burned all of our photos onto discs so we have hard copies of everything. I don't want to go through that again! Yay for Mac for taking care of you!
Can't wait to see all of your November posts! I haven't been getting nearly enough of my MEP fix lately.
This has scared me straight. I must back up our hard drive. I bought an external hard drive back in 2005 at my husband's urgent request. Do you know what's on it? No? Neither do I, as the last time I used it was the first time I used it.
I felt your pain with the computer problems! Uugh. Does that Mac have an Intel chip? I hear those are more reliable! ;-)
Good luck with NaBloPoMo.
Keep the drive, MEP. There are things that can be done to recover data that the geniuses won't try. It's expensive, but if you keep the drive, you'll always have the option. Regan
I really cannot wait to read a post a day from you (or at least something like it). Perhaps I'll find some inspiration there. On the Apple repair front, don't you just love it when people actually take CARE of you, rather than just jacking you around? Just spurs my righteous indignation even more that people just want a little recognition and concern. That is all, and the world would be so much happier if it happened more often, no?
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