TGIF

Hey! It's Friday. Hooray! It's been a long week and I'm looking forward to some down time. Or more to the point, some "not at work" time. 

This week, I had to deal with the ramifications of my hard drive failing. The drive started making noises on Thursday of last week, so we ordered a new drive right away. The drive arrived on Friday so the first thing on the agenda for Saturday was installing the drive and running the cloning program to copy all of the files. The intense activity of the copy was just too much for the drive and it went "Ka-BLAM". Figuratively, of course.

The contents copied in order, so my applications and archive files made it, but my "users" folder did not, and that's where all of my "in progress" work lived, along with all of my preferences and my mail. I was in a bit of a panic regarding the in progress work, but we have an offsite back up for those files. I was just hoping they had them. We tried to get files before and ran into some problems.

Dwight had to reinstall some software and I lost all of my font program sets, so it was back to the drawing board on a lot of things. You forget how much customization you build into applications until you have to recreate them all. 

But one of the more frustrating things was losing my email. I kept folders for clients, important receipts, template emails—the works (and this includes my personal email account, but I have redundancy on that since I get that mail on my home laptop as well). So I can't refer back to emails for current jobs or digging up email archives for old ones.

One thing I will say, though, is that when push comes to shove (or when your hard drive takes a dump) you find you don't need a bunch of the random crap you think you have to keep. 

I was able to get my "in progress" folder back, so that was a huge relief. All of the other inconveniences are easier to deal with. Having to recreate weeks and weeks of work, on the other hand, would have been a nightmare. 

Monday and Tuesday were greatly impacted by the computer woes and I ended up staying until about 8:30 pm both nights. That sucked. Wednesday was tap night, so I got out of work at a good time and yesterday, I just decided I'd had enough and that work could wait until today. I took advantage of the time home and did some baking and cooking. I'm hoping post about that tonight once I have a chance to go through the pics I took.

It wasn't the worst week on record, by any stretch, but the stress of the hard drive crud and long hours took their toll and I'm ready for a break. My hips and back have been bothering me, too, so I need to take some time to redeem the massage gift certificate I've had in my possession for probably 6 months. 

I'm not sure what's on the agenda for Sunday, but Saturday is booked. Dwight and I are going to the ND v Purdue game with my parents. Dad's ND connections came through and were able to procure 4 tickets together. They weren't gratis (darn) but we haven't been in probably 6 years, so we're looking forward to it. The weather is going to be downright beautiful. It's supposed to be almost 80 degrees tomorrow and it always feels warmer in the stadium, so it'll be toasty. Better load up on the sunscreen or I'll look like this:

OUCH!