Lost a Part of Myself

Got home from work yesterday all happy and excited and ready to start Christmas Vacation. Booted up the old PC, leashed the doggie and took her out to the yard. Got back in and noticed the Windoze spash screen was still up and thought to myself, Hmmmm, that's taking longer than usual. Filled my omnipresent soda glass and came here to sit down and watch the hourglass. And watch it. And watch it. I tried rebooting unpteen times. Safe mode. Failed. Regular mode. Failed. Scandisk. Hung up. Scandisk. Stuck at 2%. Scandisk: FAT ERROR - SCANDISK CANNOT FIX!

Something I've only heard about before, but that never happened to me till yesterday - drive failure. The drive is now sitting on the piano bench and a new one is inside here. So much to do. So much to reinstall. So many things I'll never get back. Oh, there's nothing really irreplacable on the old one - no vital data that I can't live without. Just about all of the over a hundred thousand digital pics are on the external hard drive and on CDs. Document files, some as old as my full computing history, except for the most recent, are nicely tucked away somewhere.

Gone - lots of old cracked shareware that I used a lot.

Gone - good programs that I don't know if I'll ever find the original disks for.

Gone - a part of me. I feel like something was amputated - cut out - tossed away.

I'm up and running, but I have miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.