NOT-OK COMPUTER

Christmas Eve I sufferred the nightmare of a hard drive crash. My notebook computer locked up on me and then refused to restart, informing me that the operating system could not be found. A little time on tech support with the manufacturer only informed me that everything was gone, the repair discs they supplied me with would not work, and since my warranty with them was kaput, they could charge me $40 to continue the call and still not have it fixed. So, I have to take it back to where I bought it, as I still have two years left on my warranty there.

Still, I was ill-prepared for how devastasting a loss this would feel like, and what a ridiculous act of timing it was to not be able to do a single thing about it because of Christmas. I actually didn't lose that much in the scheme of things. I backed up the novel when it was finished, though of course I had not backed up everything else recently enough. I lost almost all the work I did on my novella over the past couple of weeks; it was the second draft, though, and I have a printout of the first. I also have a prinout of what was to be this month's "Can You Picture That?" but I won't be able to post it anyway. I lost some personal journal writing that is a bit sad to say good-bye to; that's the only sort of stuff it's hard to recreate. My e-mail is gone, too. Completely.

So, I'm going to be hard to get ahold of electronically for a bit. My back-up computer started to refuse to get on the internet last summer, and I haven't solved that problem yet. The old link I had to get to my confessions123 mail via the web isn't working, either. golightly@gmail.com is likely your best bet, but I am not sure how much I will be on the net for the time being.

So, if you e-mailed me later than Friday at 6:00 (Barry, you were the last guy I replied to), now you know why you haven't heard back.