Singing the Hard Drive Blues

Last Thursday, the hard drive on my laptop went kablooie.  I won't say I'm the kind of person who doesn't back things up regularly, but . . . I'm the kind of person who doesn't back things up as often as I should.  I was out for coffee with a new friend on Thursday, and it worked fine.  But I got home and, nothing.  I waited 40 minutes for Firefox to load up -- and it never did.  The guy who fixes my computer picked it up on Friday and kept it until Tuesday -- I felt as if I had lost a limb.  Before he came, I was frantically trying to back things up, and I got most of my work files and pictures off, but I had to leave my extensive collection of textures behind.  

 I've been feeling kind of poisoned this week.

When I got it back, then the fun began.  Have you ever had to rebuild a hard drive from scratch?  I've been doing it nonstop for the last four days.  So many programs -- Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. -- I don't have on disc, so I had to re-download them.   And you have to get Flash, Adobe Reader, Quicktime, on and on.  And then, I had to go through my paypal records, seeing whom I made payments to over the last two years -- and contact all those people, to ask if they could replace the textures I'd gotten from them.  

They were all wonderful.  Jill at Flypaper (I'm their biggest fan) sent them right away, as did others.  But one artist went way beyond helping me recover my textures -- she sent me her entire collection, way beyond what I had initially purchased from her.  I was very touched.

  But, there's always some light in the darkness -- 

Oh, and my Wacom tablet went on the fritz today -- so it will be hard for me to finish my final for the Painting with Computers class -- sigh.  I'll have to do it very carefully, in Photoshop (so hard to do with a mouse).  

How is everyone else doing?  Tell me something nice.