September (or, "Excuses, Excuses")

My previous post was on August 28th. Today is October 12th. You’re probably wondering, “What the Hell happened to September?”

Yeah, that’s a good question. And to answer you, I have my list of excuses all prepared.

I actually felt like absolute crap on August 28th when I last posted something here. And the very specific kind of absolute crap that I felt like told me that the Bad Health Days were coming.

What I’m talking about when I say ‘Bad Health Days’ are the days when the Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome decides that it hasn’t been doing enough to keep me out of the game, and remedies that by upping the pain, the fatigue, the nausea, the dizziness, the brain fog, and a big handful of other various/varying elements for awhile.

So it’s not just that I didn’t do any posting in the first half of September. I didn’t to much of anything for those two-plus weeks. I laid in bed. I sat in a chair. I re-watched “Sports Night”. Tried reading, but gave it up because my brain wasn’t really retaining what I’d read from session to session. (How sick was I? I wasn’t even masturbating.)

Once I finally started to crawl out of the super ultra deluxe ‘Bad Health’ pit back up to my normal levels of bad health, I sat back down at the keyboard and started writing again. I wrote three entries to post here. (One about my health issues, one about the FetLife community, and one about Craigslist.)

Then I had the opportunity to spend the weekend at my sister’s apartment. You know, that place where the internet lives. This is usually the ideal opportunity to post stuff to my blog. Unfortunately, it was a spur of the moment trip. The phone call said, “We’re in town, and can take you back to Salem for the weekend if you can be ready in five minutes.”

My computer hadn’t even been turned on yet that day. And while I hadn’t timed it or anything, it seemed like it had been taking more than five minutes lately to go from OFF to FUNCTIONAL here lately. And, being one of the all-time great procrastinators of our time, I hadn’t copied the posts onto my flash drive yet. So, I grabbed clothing, meds, and other assorted miscellany, then went to Salem without the stuff to post here. (Also without my ‘Internet To-Do List’, or several other files I’d really needed to take with me.)

While at my sister’s, I decided that within a day or so of returning home, I was going to walk up to the library, and post the material using one of the computers there. It was, after all, now several weeks since my last post, and I didn’t like that. This plan was thwarted however, by the fact that my sister’s apartment is just around the corner from a Jack-in-the-Box location. And as I was walking back to her apartment from said fast food joint with my sack containing a meaty breakfast burrito and seasoned curly fries in hand, I took a misstep off a curb, and the next thing I know I’m sitting on the sidewalk having just wrenched my ankle.

After sitting there for a few minutes, I got to my feet as best I could, and hobbled the rest of the way back to her place, then collapsed on the couch. My sister played nurse, and wrapped my sprained ankle to within an inch of it’s life with ACE bandages, and I spent the rest of the weekend seated upon my big fat ass.

Once I was returned home, I continued to sit on the big fat ass instead of walking up the big steep hill to get to the library to post the next three entries. And while I had started work on a potential fourth post, I still hadn’t dumped anything to the flash drive.

Then my computer suffered a hard drive crash.

My computer has three hard drives. I would estimate that 99% of the content on the E-Drive is stuff that I’ve also got on either CDs or DVDs. Disks people downloaded for me, which I then loaded onto the drive. Stuff that is therefore easily replaceable. This is NOT the drive that crashed.

The majority of the stuff on the D-Drive is also stuff that I’ve got backed up on disks. The stuff that isn’t is mostly MP3s that I’ve ripped from my CD collection. Stuff which, if I lost, I could replace, simply by going through and re-ripping my CDs. Again. Time-consuming, but still . . . replaceable. This is NOT the drive that crashed.

The C-Drive contains – among other things – the “Projects” folder. The “Projects” folder is where the writing lives. Writing projects. Countless notes for writing projects. Journals. Blog posts. Correspondence. Everything. I try to keep this stuff backed up, but – procrastinator, remember – my last backup of this material seems to have been in July . . . of 2007. (Whoops.) The material on the C-Drive is IRREPLACABLE, and, you guessed it, this one IS the drive that crashed.

A couple of days later, I was back at my sister’s apartment, having placed my computer in the care of her fiancé. He ripped it apart, and managed to get partial access to the drive to try and retrieve as many files as were still accessible.

Far, far more were corrupt than not. The blog posts were among the corrupt and therefore gone. (As was one of my data DVD catalogs. I now have a series of DVD spindles containing disks numbered 01 – 132, with no idea what’s actually on them.)

Anyway . . .

I’ve got my computer back now. I’m starting new files as old ideas reoccur to me. But one of the immediate goals is to get back to work on this blog. I will probably rewrite as best I can from memory the three and a half entries lost in the crash, then continue from there. Definitely going to load each one onto the flash drive as I complete it. (I’ve already made a back-up of all of the files we were able to retrieve.)

Next post soon.

Cross your fingers.