Tragedy strikes

Well, I didn't think it was actually a tragedy until it affected me.

Yes, I'm shallow.

The computer downstairs in the family room crashed last week.

Dd and I successfully printed some stuff for her science fair mouse project; and then ds wanted to boot up to play Runescape. He has this bad habit of not waiting until the little hour glass thingy stops and keeps pressing buttons and getting frustrated. He's been warned. And banned a few times.

Because of his crippling addiction to Runescape, the time he gets on the machine is rationed and monitored (sometimes ineffectively) by AOL parental controls. (Did you know that you can use them in Internet Explorer now, not just when signing in to AOL?)

Anyway, he *claims that it just froze and that he DIDN'T DO ANYTHING.
"Really Mom, I didn't. It just went black." Uh-huh.

Anyway, I wasn't terribly upset. We had a computer geek guru coming over anyway to fix something on DH's computer. When I tried to reboot it, I got a message that something ws corrupted. Number one son could suffer a little without his precious game. Heck, the weather turned nice, go outside and play. And baseball and spring hockey started last week.

Then the news starting getting bad. When computer geek guru looked at it and inserted the start-up disk, he was puzzled because none of his abracadabra worked. So, he took the offending machine away to his magic den.

Then the really bad news came. He couldn't get ANYTHING off the hard drive. Nothing. Zipo. Nada. It's gone. All of it. Now, I've been using a nifty little Apple Macbook since June so I wasn't toooo worried.

Until I realized that all photos for about a year or so prior to my laptop were lost.
Okay, disapointing, but I can deal. If I couldn't remember what was there, I wouldn't miss it right? Besides, Dh has some stuff on the digital video camera.

Then I started thinking more.

All, ALL of my music was on Windows Media Player there. I bought a Sansa mp3 player before I went to the Apple, and so everything I own was on that. Was.

In a misguided attempt to declutter my life and home, I sold all of my CDs at a local consignment shop. And no, not all of my music was on the mp3 player. I ran out of memory. Yes, my wonderful dh bought me more memory - a memory card ( a year ago) and I never used it. I am just sick thinking about all that music gone. GONE.

And I feel stupid.

I think I need a large glass, no goblet of wine. Now. Yes, I realize it's before noon.