The weekend’s email woes have wrapped up. Feel free to breathe a sigh of relief with me; at stake was rather a large amount of data making up almost 11 years of my life, and it is thankfully all resolved happily now. It all started out with “The power supply needs swapping out,” but then turned out to be far more extensive and require multiple excursions to the computer stuff store (which, since we no longer live in Silicon Valley, is noticeably more than 6 blocks away). So things took a while, and my better half truly saved the day. Me, I crammed a power supply in the dead box and found out it still didn’t work. He, on the other hand, shed the blood the computer gods always require in order to allow the happy resolution of problems like this turned out to be.
I, of course, spent the weekend kicking myself for not-current backups plus not having checked the integrity of the backups I did have in who knows how long. I thought about (and tried not to think about, then realized it would be wise to accept the possible reality of) losing things like photos of our son the day he was born, all the contact information I store in my inbox along with to-do lists, drafts of things in my home directory, and saved writings from before my last big data loss in 1997. I resolved to back up certain essential types of things to burnt CDs which I will then copy a dozen times and store in a complex distributed system involving safe deposit boxes, my mother, and do I know anybody in Europe that I could ask to store a pile of discs for me?
I spun a lot of sample and test yarn. I did some swatching. Some worked and some didn’t. I was crabby. I took deep breaths and walked away. I did the dishes and took out the trash. And I enjoyed that “Mole Poblano” blend.
But, as you can see, I had to step things up from just the beer.
When I took that picture, half-sprawled out on the deck with the camera, thinking “Why am I doing this instead of just drinking the margarita?” and pondering what an absurdity it sometimes is to be a blogger — I mean, seriously, “Let me just take this margarita and this yarn out on the deck where the light is good” — I was already thinking how, if things went poorly, I would probably be really glad I’d opted to get the good tequila, setting up the photo I’d have to take of limes, salt, and shotglasses with… what? A ball of yarn? A swatch? I was thinking how totally unseemly it would be for someone’s mom to be doing tequila shots of grief over a piece of computer hardware, but how I’d likely go there anyway if it came to it, and just have to pray I didn’t end up with one of those stories that wraps up with someone saying “It’s just that your pants are on inside out,” while you wake up on the lawn of a retirement community wearing only one shoe, a shoe which actually belongs to someone else and which you’ve never seen before.
Thankfully, things didn’t progress past “sprawled on the deck taking a picture of my drink with yarn wrapped around the bottom of the glass.” I’m sure that would have looked strange enough to most people, but you all understand, right? Right?
*crickets*
It’s really nice yarn, though. And the margarita wasn’t bad either.
Some mail may have bounced; other mail may still be deferred and working its way through an arcane series of queues to arrive at my inbox. If you haven’t heard back from me by this evening, please go ahead and resend your email!