Stirring The Soup

The great Trickster reached down and stirred the soup of my life with one finger this week. I have some sort of flu, my tax person is trying to sort out why all my (two states and federal) refunds are messed up, and my computer crashed.

My computer crashing is tantamount to taking away my telephone and moving me so far out into the boondocks that messenger pigeons have trouble knowing where I live. It is like being grounded by a very unforgiving parent. Everything is on my computer.

Email is my way of communicating with friends across the country. Paying bills, and keeping track of my banking is all on line. My pictures were stored on my computer this year and they are all lost, except for the ones that were stored on line. All of my work is stored on the computer, books, stories, My Thots, cards, but most of that was carefully, and correctly, backed up. My music! All of my music that was neatly categorized and stored on itunes is gone! In short, my computer defines everyday life like a script does a sit com, only I'm not laughing right now.

I spent hours redoing what I could. Now I am trying to replace what is gone forever. For what it's worth, much cannot be replaced and I guess that is okay, sort of a cosmic cleansing, a forced simplifying of my life. Unfortunate from my standpoint, but not catastrophic. Other things can mostly be replaced with new versions that will require either buying a program, or spending hours downloading my old Cd's, and maybe re-buying a few songs.

I finally bought the Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 to replace my old Adobe program which is evidently gone forever. It is so different that I feel like a sleepwalker in a nightmare world. Nothing feels intuitive here for me, at least not yet.

The joys of living in the nano second! One quick stir and everything is affected. Well, not really everything. The truly important things, like people and life go on as usual.

I'd like to blame all of this on something that could be exorcised, but the truth is that I need to do a better job backing everything up in the future. And the truth is that I haven't done too much of that again, yet. Makes me wonder how big of a learning curve I need?