Have you been wracking your brains, trying to imagine what minor insult or slight in the past year cause me to summarily kick you off my Christmas card list? Well, let me reassure you. I did NOT send out a Christmas card this year, or you surely would have gotten one! It was impossible in the thick of the kitchen hell to get one figured out and implemented. I might have pulled it off, maybe, had all my address labels not been lost in the hard drive crash of 2008. But combined kitchen insanity and the lack of easy one-touch addressing made the whole thing just way, way too daunting. Impossible, even. Didn't happen. Fear not. Anyhoo, I'm looking at maybe a Valentine card. No shortage of adorable pictures to choose from.
Speaking of the hard drive crash, here's what happened in the end. My dear friend and favorite geek in whole world Colin hooked me up with a computer savvy and very kind-hearted soul in the Cleveland. This wonderful man, I'll call him K, took my hard-drive under his wing and tried his damnedest to salvage it. K even FROZE it, attempting a scheme to expand the metal and thus get it running for a few moments to pull off the much-missed material. It didn't work. Then he managed to persuade those incredible hard drive surgeons in California– with the white suits and the "clean room," the ones who wanted to charge me upwards of $2,000– to attempt to rescue my material for as little as $100, in return for an article about their services. I loved this idea and shipped my hard drive to them with a glimmer of hope.
However, what happened was that even THEY could not rescue it. Imagine, they save hard drives that have been crushed by trucks, burned by fires, sunk deep in the ocean, and yet they couldn't save mine. It just quietly died one day of natural causes, sitting safely on a table, but was totally and finally dead. No resurrection. No Lazarus.
And yet I was still incredibly happy to have K's help with the whole thing. Because otherwise, it would all be about the $2,000. I would tuck the drive away and say to myself, "Someday… I've get that $2,000 and doggone it I get that writing back!" It would perhaps take years, but I would continue to believe that it might, just might be possible. And now, instead, I can just move on the final stage of grief process, acceptance. I can say, no money on earth could save it and it's truly gone. This provides closure, which I appreciate.
Meanwhile I've found at least some of what I thought I'd lost. The addresses came along as an unpleasant additional loss I had not realized until I needed them. Oh well… live and learn. I now have a 320 gb harddrive sitting right here on the desk and am backing everything up constantly.
In other news, the kitchen is still wonderful. The children are trying to destroy it, which makes me crazy. Elias attacked a cabinet with a fork, gouging it. He also colored on the counters, but at least it was only pencil. Isaac has thrown projectiles at the walls, marring them. Everyone, myself included, tends to leave things on the counter. Even a stunning sink can get filled with dishes mighty quick. I've learned that maintaining it in ready-for-photo-shoot perfection takes constant, near-psychotic vigilance. But I'm trying, I honestly am. It pains me to see it in any way scuffed or "lived in." It's like a new car or a newborn babe. I am reminding myself of that sort of fish, I can't recall its name, but the male makes a nest on the ocean floor. He then tends the nest constantly, moving bits of sand here and there to increase its perfection in ways only apparent to himself. If another fish comes anywhere near it, he chases it away and even bites it. This is like me and the kitchen. Can it last forever? I don't think so, but I will hold the line as long as I can.