It’s a dreary first day of February here…the rain has been steadily tap, tap, tapping on the roof for hours. It’s not cold; it’s not hot; it’s just miserable. But, there’s a pot of curried pumpkin soup on the stove (yum) and Valentine’s Puppy Chow cooling on sheets of wax paper in the kitchen. Abigail and I are taking a sick day from church tonight (she’s running a slight fever and I’ve pulled my back out yet again). As gray as the day is though, I am so glad that it’s February. I am glad to say goodbye to January.
The month certainly wasn’t without its high points. We took our first trip to Disney with the added bonus of going with my sister and her family. Gracie celebrated her 8th birthday in grand style. We celebrated Chinese New Year and Gracie brought home a good report card. We went to the beach several times and had a wonderful dinner at my favorite restaurant with some dear friends. Not much to complain about.
Still, as delightful as parts of January were, there were still parts that tried my very patience. Like Monday morning. I woke up and, as I always do, booted up my server so I could do some database work. Or at least I tried to boot the server. Two seconds after I pushed the power button, a message flashed on the black screen: “No boot device available.” Sigh. Unfortunately, missing boot drives are bad news. Fortunately, we live in an amazing time, particularly for wannabe computer repair techs with access to Google. I found a cool little universal drive adapter that lets you pull out a hard drive and hook it up to a USB port. I ordered it from Amazon and it arrived on Tuesday. I pulled both drives out of the dead server and tested them. Luckily, one of the drives was just fine. Unfortunately, the other one still wasn’t recognized. I am not the best at backing up my data. I know, I know, believe me I know. Most of my data is backed up in different locations, but it’s not exactly systematic and there was information on that drive that I really would have liked to have back, mostly pictures of the girls. So, yesterday, I went on a quest and after tons of on-line searching and talking with Seagate (the manufacturer of the drive), I was able to restore the partition on the drive and get the data back. Yay! Was it worth all that trouble? I’d say definitely. I found a slew of pictures that I’d forgotten all about. Looking through the folders on the drive last night was taking a wonderful walk through my memories of the last few years. Sometimes, losing things is the best way to find them again.
This picture is Gracie a couple of weeks before she started kindergarten. I remember the simplicity of that summer…months without a schedule…the time before school and all its scheduling started, the summer before my father got sick. It was a blissful time and it felt good last night to pull this picture up and remember it and to remind myself that life is not always as hectic as it feels now.