Kicking myself...

I will keep this one brief, as I could drone on forever and cry, yell, throw things, etc., but since I've already participated in most, if not all, of those activities, I'll just issue a cautionary statement to all:

BACK UP EVERYTHING ON YOUR COMPUTER

Ours died. Just out of nowhere died. No long goodbyes, no warning. I used it last Wed afternoon. Signed off, walked away. Dave tried to use it Wednesday night and it said, "no thanks." After some time with a help desk, and then subsequent time with Matt (our resident computer geek/brother-in-law - not sure what order he prefers that in!), the diagnosis was that the hard drive was gone. THANKFULLY, I had backed up all but 16 days of photos. Unfortunately, I was not so smart with the little log I had kept of all of the 'firsts' in Luke's life. A good friend lost her wedding ring and finally calmed herself down by realizing that she had lost a ring, not her husband. That was a great lesson for me last week! Plus, Luke is a boy. He'll never ever care when he first sat up on his own or smiled at me. And I still have all the pictures. Besides, I've moved onto obsessing about what's lost that I've not thought of yet - other things I don't access often and haven't occurred to me as lost yet.

But, nothing to do about it now. The hard drive was replaced Tuesday and we are up and running again. Now begins the process of loading all my picture CD's back onto the computer so I can try to estimate dates for Luke's scrapbook. Oh, the fun of it all...