Two weeks and counting, and the guys at Fry’s haven’t even touched the thing yet. We went in on Thursday to check up on things and they said it was still near the back of the line. We were at least able to convince them to order the new hard drive ahead of time so it didn’t have to wait around for parts to arrive when they were finally ready to pay it some attention.

This current Fry’s guy also warned us that the information is almost positively lost. We called the super powerful data retrieval folks that Fry’s referred us to, and they’ll happily check things out for us. It will only cost us somewhere between $800 – $1800.

That’s kind of a lot of money. Even for something as priceless as baby photos. Thank goodness I’m a blogger and we still have all the photos I’ve shared. We lost a lot of his pictures, but between flickr and costco.com saving all the photos I’ve sent off to print, we have the best ones. So we’re not going to bother calling in the super-experts, which means what isn’t on the external hard drive is gone.

This has been such a colosal bummer for me. My craft book is probably safe in some version, but who knows how much I lost. All my podcasts that keep me sane and sleeping through the night, all my work. And of course the pictures.

We’ve also lost all the emails and contact information we ever had, so if you’d like a Christmas card this year, please email me your info (and any info you may have for someone else we know) to either tresa at reesedixon dot com or tresa at tresaedmunds dot com .

I will continue poking along on this ancient laptop and trying not to have daily panic attacks over how much I’ve lost and how cut off from the world I am.

I was working in my studio today, happy as a clam and whistling a little tune, when all of a sudden I started hearing this unholy grinding noise coming from another room.

After ruling out anything easily fixable, I wandered over to the (brand new) computer with my throat closing with every step. I have such irrational panic about the computer. I have so much of my work on it, all my designs and pictures, Atti’s whole life worth of pictures, music and podcasts I listen to all day long, all my phone numbers and addresses, my whole outside world. I don’t spend a lot of time with people in the flesh. I have therapy appointments of one kind or another with Atti every single day. On top of all the hardships of this year, I have no social life outside of the internet. The internet is what allows me to function happily in my hermit existance.

Hearing the sound of gears grinding growing louder and louder the closer I got to the computer sent me panicking nearly to convulsions. The computer was completely frozen, so I turned it off and turned it back on, except it wouldn’t turn on. When Bear came home we rushed over to Fry’s hoping it would be a simple fan problem. Maybe all the cat hair I swim through made it’s way inside and is jamming up the works. No luck. The noise appears to be a catastrophic hard drive failure.

The computer’s under warranty, so we’ll get a new one with no problem. The issue is that they’re not certain they’ll be able to get anything off of it. At all.

No pictures, no patterns, no programs, no podcasts, no pictures.

Bear is confident that everything will work out OK, but what really hacks me off in the moment is that I had been working on the pattern for a stuffed black cat I made LAST YEAR that I was so excited to share with everyone. So now even if they manage to get anything off of it (and Bear is literally calling the people who retrieve data for the US military to make sure they do) there’s no way I’ll get it in time to share the pattern I’ve been sitting on for a year. Plus I’ll have to live without podcasts for two weeks, and surf the internet on an ancient laptop that takes five solid minutes to open a page and isn’t even compatible with flash.

I realize this is the very definition of a first world problem. But it’s the first world problem that hits me the hardest in my soft spots. Wanting to be productive, creating roots and commemorating branches, treasuring the life we’re creating together, overcoming the anxiety I struggle under….this darn computer is a symbol of my whole life and all my efforts, and it’s broken. It’s hard not to extrapolate that into meaning more than it should.

My eye is on its way to recovery now. I have to goop it up every few hours with antibiotic ointment to try to clean up a very dirty kitty scratch. The offending cat is now in my lap trying to make things up to me. He’s very repentant.

I wish I could say that this is an unusual occurrence for me – this confluence of disasters that make everything go wrong all at once and leave me huddled in a corner somewhere waiting for the day to end. But it’s not. This happens to me all the time. As soon as one unfortunate thing happens it’s pretty much an avalanche.

Nearly every week I go for tacos with my sister-in-law Mari. We meet at Rubios and then we usually run a couple of errands nearby. The closest Rubios is in a parking lot with Target, Ross, Old Navy, and Michaels, so there is never a week when we don’t have to go to at least two of those places.

A few weeks ago I got to lunch late because I had about forty errands to run and I was trying to gather everything together to do it all at once. Coupons for this store, the paper to match for that project, the package to go to the post office, blah blah blah. By the time I got there they were nearly done eating. I ordered my food and started bolting it down when Atti started fussing for some more lunch. I reached into the diaper bag and realized that in my rush to get everything together and get out the door I left his bottle on the kitchen counter.

As Atti got more and more upset and started screaming louder and louder, I grabbed all my stuff up, abandoning any plans of efficient errand running, and hurried to get the car loaded up and him home to his bottle. I was struggling with the keys in my hand while I was trying to put his car seat in its base, so I threw the keys into the front seat, got him strapped in, and shut the door.

Only to discover that I had somehow hit the lock button in my struggles with the seat, and I had then locked my starving baby in a black car on a 95 degree day.

I lost it. I completely lost it. Luckily Mari was there to handle calling AAA, and her mother-in-law Virginia was there to keep me from going completely Mama Bear and ripping the door off with my teeth. The lock guy came out in a hurry and got the door open with no problem, and we discovered Atti sleeping sweetly.

I was really shaken up by the whole experience, so I abandoned all my plans of efficient errand running and raced home to smother my baby with love and cry about my failure as a mother.

The very next week at Taco Tuesday, we were shopping at Ross when Atti decided he had had enough of his car seat and started fussing. I went to the checkout, but it was Ross after all, where you get bargain prices at the expense of waiting in line for two days while one lone checker tries to do everything herself. After waiting in line for 20 minutes, all while trying to keep my baby calm, I was totally flustered and just wanting to run to the car. I started to wheel my cart out the door only to get stuck on something. I was fighting to push the doors open with the cart and get out of there, running over my own foot in the process, until a security guard came over to hold the doors open for me. Only then did I realize that my cart had one of those metal poles on it to prevent the cart from leaving the store. The professional security guard didn’t notice it, and instead watched as a sweaty lady with a baby tried to fit a round peg through the square door hole. I finally realized what was going on when I tried to figure out what it was stuck on, and the security guard brought me a new cart that I could actually wheel out to my car. Muttering a few thousand curse words under my breath, I finally got everything loaded up, brought the cart back, and got on the road.

Somehow, despite all the excitement, Atti had once again managed to fall asleep, so I decided to push my luck and go to Target. I leisurely strolled from aisle to aisle, went through checkout actually managing to remember to bring in my reusable shopping bags, only to discover that my wallet was missing.

I emptied the diaper bag, I searched the car, I went back to Ross, it was gone. By the time I got home someone had already charged a couple hundred bucks worth of art supplies on one of my cards.

Being the hyper OCD person that I am, I have a list of card numbers and phone numbers handy, so canceling cards was no big deal. No, the crappy bit is all the other things I had in my wallet. My Drivers License I have to go in person to the DMV to replace. My temple recommend which involves two different appointments. My punch card to the yogurt place that was almost full up. The $100 gift card to baby gap my sweet aunt and uncle and family sent to me. The complete list of Martha Stewart glitters with the ones I already own crossed off. All those new business cards I just made. Stupid jerks.

Anyway, I think you can see now why I so rarely leave the house.