Computer woes

As you can see, I'm finally back to blogging after my long absence. I actually have a bunch of blogs I've drafted over the past few weeks that are "in the can" and set to auto-publish over the next few days. I have been going through withrdawal, lately, without my regular blog fix!

Just before Labor Day, my computer started to give me a hard time. It was repeatedly crashing and not saving documents properly. Finally, on Friday, my computer froze. I tried rebooting it, and my computer informed me it did not detect a hard drive. My heart STOPPED in that instant. My life (my work, pictures of Micah, videos, music, tax information, emails, writings, everything) are all wrapped up in this tiny little computer. And worst of all, I have been delinquent about backing up my hard drive.

After a few more tries and a restore session, my computer seemed to boot. At least I could see my files. My computer informed me there was a fatal error on my hard drive, and instructed me to backup my files, shut the computer down and get a new hard drive. I desperately tried to do a complete hard drive backup, but it kept failing. I managed to salvage all of my picture files (at least the ones that were not lost the prior three days), my outlook file, my pictures, my music, and most of my work files. It was a holiday weekend, so I could not get Dell to ship the part until Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Dell guy arrived at my house with a new hard drive.

After swapping out my hard drive (and fixing a few other things that were wrong), I was informed I would have to completely re-load all the software onto my computer. Since the move, I have no idea where my disks are. Dell had to send me fresh disks, and I was not able to start re-loading the software on my computer until Saturday. It took me most of Saturday and Sunday to get my computer up and running and restored, and Sunday afternoon I flew off to Atlanta for work.

This has been a very long week so far - meetings all day every day from 8 until 7. I did get to catch up with an old friend, but these weeks take a lot out of me. To top it all off, I'm flying to Orlando Tuesday through Thursday for another conference next week. I'm off to Minnesota and Chicago in October and Kansas in November. I'm dreading all this travel and time away from Micah :(.