Crash and Fall

Normally when I don't blog for awhile, it's because I've been on a last-minute vacation or something else super fun like that. I wish that was the case! It's been a very long two weeks, aside from a few happy days spent with Liz and her babies in Idaho. My grandma was in the ICU, we had problem after problem to sort through with our house, we got bummer news from a doctor, we actually canceled a vacation, we continued to deal with little issues from our PCS, and...

The most unfortunate of all non-life-threatening events occurred. My external hard drive, containing all of our pictures and videos since the beginning of time, crashed. This has pretty much been my greatest fear since as long as I can remember. As a little girl, I used to worry that our house would burn down and we would lose all of our pictures -- the loss of pictures being the problem with that scenario. Basically, this is my worst nightmare.

I've always made sure to have everything stored in at least two places, but with the move, I got horribly behind schedule. Most older pictures are backed up, most newer ones are not. (Luckily, I still had a small sampling of pictures from Jake's birthday and party on my camera just in case, because I'm paranoid like that.) The biggest tragedy is that we only have about 10% of our videos backed up. All of the cutest little videos of my sweet baby... I just can't even begin to tell you how absolutely devastating this is to me. I'm so sick about it.

It's a rather long story, but the short version is that the hard drive had a rapid decline and actually crashed while I was trying to copy things over to a new hard drive. (Just the most important folder even, since I worried that copying over too much at once might overwhelm the drive.) That makes this all the more frustrating since it's not like I was just naively going about my merry way when I lost everything. The hard drive is currently with professional repair hope #1, after which we'll take it to computer whiz #2, and if all else fails, we're prepared to pay inhumane amounts of money to the data recovery company that we selected after hours upon hours of research. The internet tells me that with my model and symptoms, even the data recovery experts only run a 50/50 chance of getting my files back. We have every extremity crossed that at least our most favorite videos of Jake can be recovered. At the risk of sounding horrifically dramatic, I might die if it doesn't work.

On a happier note, we welcomed fall by driving the Alpine Loop post-computer-apocalypse. We loved taking in the scenery as we played at Aspen Grove. The colors are so vibrant and beautiful this time of year! On a sadder note, it's sort of freezing and I'm really missing warmer weather and beaches and Disneyland and California and our home and, well, you get the idea. Like I said, kind of a bummer two weeks. But! We're going on a little road trip to one of our very most favorite places in the entire world this weekend and are very excited about that. And we're all happy and healthy and doing great overall. And the mountains are so pretty right now...