“All is lost…!”
Well, a LOT is lost. Yesterday my computer crashed and we couldn’t save anything. The hard drive was erased and the basic stuff reloaded. I lost my mail, the booklets and articles that weren’t on flashdrives for printing at Pennsic, all my notes for the New Normal and Changing Times Changing Worlds, cookbooks, pictures, music.
If you aren’t backing up, do it, if you think you are, check to see that it’s working. I discovered last month that my back up drive was dead, and opted to start using a flash drive to back up, but didn’t do it right, the copying got interrupted and I got files from numerals to ones starting with b. Nothing after C. I’ve also been paying for on-line back up through TDS, but it wasn’t installed. So check and make sure your back up IS backing up.
I am alternating between wallowing in self pity, trying to face the reconstruction with resolve, and joy when I discover something has been saved somewhere. Apparently back in 2007 we saved a lot of stuff onto discs. I am still going through those to see what’s there. There’s more about this in this weeks edition of my letter. I tell you I am very grateful for every letter I’d gotten posted, and hopeful that we may find someone who’s still got it somewhere. (Yesterday morning I was planning on doing a blog-post about the Golden Sword Tourney, look in the letter to get more on that.) 
In the role of being a horrible warning, I want to pass along that the reason the guys at the computer store think the hard drive fried was that we turned the computer off by pushing the power button, not clicking on the shut -down in the menu. Apparently the power button makes the computer force quit, interrupting the system the computer uses to organize itself. This creates blank spaces in the disc space that screws things up something fierce. Now, there have been times when pushing the power button was OK, but apparently it isn’t any more, so learn from our mistake and don’t lose your information. I didn’t know how much I would lose until I lost it.
Tchipakkan 