Stop Reading This Post Right Now...

...and go make a back-up of your entire computer. Cloud-drive, DVDs, anything -- actually, use everything.

 Why no posts since Christmas? To be quite honest, I just haven't felt any motivation to post. Primarily because all of our pictures are currently in limbo on a piece-of-junk external hard drive that quit on us the day after Christmas. We saved all of our files to that drive instead of the computer, thinking that such a measure would prevent heart-breaking data loss when our computer got nasty viruses. Which worked. Until it didn't. Our computer did get a virus the day after Christmas, and we glibly reformatted in blissful ignorance that only a few hours later, the hard drive would meet its doom. Alas, that hard drive contained every single family picture, every one of Pablo's musical compositions, every one of my half-finished stories (and the only novel I've actually finished). We're kicking ourselves now, especially since it's rather costly to extract the data! Not that kicking ourselves makes the situation any more pleasant. *wink* So please, please go back up anything on your computer that you want to keep. And then back it up again.

 All right, I don't mean to sob all over my blog. Not only does it make everything moist, it also lowers morale. It's not all doom-and-gloom around here, considering that the weather is absolutely gorgeous, Little Man just keeps getting cuter, and I'm blessed with an amazing husband (who bought me raspberry Pim's and organic chocolate for our anniversary. Oh yes, I love that man!).

That, and I finally finished my 2,000 piece puzzle. I haven't put a puzzle together in the longest time, and Oh! was it ever fun! The thing was massive, though -- almost 3 feet by 4 feet. I had to use a piece of plywood to assemble it, which meant frequently freezing my toes off in the garage as I put in just-one-more-piece.

So we're healing from our traumatic loss, though I'll feel much better when the data is actually recovered. It's one of those live-and-learn things, and it really could have been much worse. Still, at the risk of sounding akin to a broken record -- please go back up your files! *wink*