Friday, August 17, 2007

I'm Hot...Steamin,’ Actually.

The Summer from Hell continues...
Just wanted to throw up a quick post to say that it's been one helluva week. Exactly how much so is more than I have time to get into right now, but rest assured I'll have plenty to say about it next week.

As a matter of fact I would like to believe I'm moving into a very blog-heavy season of my life these upcoming six months. We're in the final stages of packing up the house as I speak. We'll rent the U-Haul truck tomorrow to move the furniture, then on Sunday, tie up a few loose ends and will at that point be officially residing in the apartment through January 2008.

There will be little else for me to do over the next ten days, so I plan on writing a lot, as we'll have cable TV but no Internet; it just happened to be our luck that the transfer of our service fell on a longer-than-usual turnaround schedule and will take a full five business days to complete.

But even beyond next week, I'm determined to catch up on writing this fall. We'll see. Being couped up in a one-bedroom flat should prove interesting fodder for the creative juices; again, we'll see.

House-wise we're finally turning the corner. Next week the contractors come in and do their thing: the structural guy will fix the foundation crack and faulty drain, the mold guy will come in and treat the mildew that's taken up residence on the floor joists, and the HVAC guy will replace the faulty refrigerator coil in the heat & air unit. I'll be spinning all the frustrating details of what I had to go through to make it happen next week as I'm catching up on the story.

The mental and emotional strife I've been through in dealing with all of this has been bad enough, but that's not what's top-of-mind at the moment.

The repairs are gonna cost a lot of money, but that's not why I'm hot.

It's really not even the weather, although it could certainly qualify as a reason. It has been hotter here in Nashville over the past 6 weeks than during any sustained period I can ever remember. Absolutely miserable weather; 100-plus-degrees temperatures day-in, day-out. Local ordinances prohibiting the watering of lawns; can't wash your car; garden irrigation is restricted to early morning hours only.

This has been the Summer from Hell, no doubt about it.

But no, that's really not even what I'm bugged about. What I'm really hot about is the fact that the little USB Pen drive (or "flash" drive) I've been using since Christmas has as of today most unceremoniously crapped out on me, taking at least a half dozen unfinished or simply unpublished blog stories along with it. Gone also are all my story notes and original manuscripts for everything I've written this year as well as a lot more that I was planning to write later.

I've got an e-mail into a data recovery company who I'm hoping will be able to help me recoup some of those lost files, but I'm not optimistic.

I'm just pissed at myself for not backing those files up somewhere else — just in case. I'm really, really bummed about this also because there were some work files on that drive that are now down the tubes as well, and I don't know as of yet what the repercussions for losing them will be.

The moral of the story, kids, is: back up your files, 'cause even if your removable storage is called a "ToughDrive," it's still not necessarily all that tough.
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