Kate: The Hard Drive Slayer

Man, the last couple of days have been killer. Last night, I came home to a blank computer screen. Ooh ooh! I know what that means! A hard drive is dead! (This is becoming old hat to me now.) I gulped hard and rebooted.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw some activity. When Windows loaded (albeit slowly), I started looking around ... and panicked. I'd lost my 40-gig D:/ drive, which largely served as backup in case my (partitioned) primary drive borked.

My main concern: the book. I was frantically digging through files ... until I remembered there's a desktop shortcut to my book directory. And it was fine. (It was at this point, and this point only, that I realized that the publisher has a copy of the book ... and I have one at work ... and one on the jumpdrive. So I wasn't in any danger ... but still ...)

Honestly, I can't figure out what I lost except for some mp3s (which are backed up on the iPod), plus some college stuff that I hadn't accessed in years. In fact, I had the entire contents of my college partitions (named JoeBob and Beef Jerky) on my D:/ drive.

R.I.P. JoeBob and Beef Jerky. Mostly you were just taking up space.

When Chris The Tech Dude came by my office this afternoon, I told him about the dead hard drive, and he slowly started backing away from my office. Paul and I have a stack of, what?, five hard drives or so that have died since January. And that's not counting the one at work that fried last month. But they were old drives ... and they'd certainly been put through their paces, like two years of near-constant brownouts when we lived in an apartment.

The second blow to my frazzled nerves came tonight, when Paul informed me the MAMML guys (link goes to his research professor) were going to be working on their mega-huge report for another week. I blew up. I know they're stressed and they want this to be right, but I feel like I'm playing second fiddle to water disinfection byproducts.

I did have to rib him some about not knowing the definition of deadline. The report was due Aug. 1. As of today, they're 10 days late ... and something about that kills my inner journalist.

But mostly, I'm just giving him a hard time.

Anyway, in an attempt to drown my sadness about the past couple of days, I decided to buy a cabochon I saw online when I was looking up links for the Bead Hub thread.

That's a picture of it above. Pretty isn't it? Also, it's fossilized dino poop. ^_^