...and you all would have killed me.

Well, something happened to me last week when I tried to do the helpful thing by selling off our guild bank. There I was, standing in the Auction House, and World of Warcraft promptly logged me off and I had to fill out that little form about what I was doing so they could fix the problem. The error was reported successfully, and then it happened:

BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!!!!!

I didn't freak. Computers hiccup all the time. I very calmly tried to restart the machine. The machine very calmly told me that it couldn't restore the session, and I tried a regular reboot. The machine could not reboot, and brought me back to the same screen five times in a loop without ever successfully booting. So I started it in safe mode. And I got the same error, and then the helpful screens with directions went bye-bye and all I was getting when the machine turned on was a black screen with a cursor on it.

Then I freaked out.

Ladies, always back up your data. My dad got me a 320GB portable drive for my birthday; trouble is, I've been so busy lately I had not had a chance to back up any of my pictures or videos (all of my textual docs are backed up using Zoho, except for older writings, which are somewhere on flash or cd). So there I was, freaking like nobody's business, and my husband telling me to chill out. All the baby pictures of Count and Gretal. All my pictures (period) since buying the computer last November. All the graphics I had made for my in-progress Google site. Memories of snow storms. Every picture of my garden this year and last. And then it hit me: All the videos of the camping trip.

Oh....#^$&#!

Mr. B tried to do a straight copy of the drive, but it was unreadable. That's when the hysteria set in. We couldn't recover anything if the backup program couldn't see the drive. After trying a handful of things, something finally found my data, thank god, and we were able to recover *everything* (well, except for my desktop background--I spent an hour hunting it down again online). We have a running theory that the table of contents on the drive is probably what screwed up, and whatever recovered things was reading the shadow.

We formatted the disk and reloaded the OS, and now all of my settings and junk are wanky, but I'll learn. Google Chrome is pretty awesome for anyone that hasn't tried it yet.

So now I owe the powers that be for saving me from my own recklessness. I'm backing up everything later today.

Alula