Fire! Fire!

The summer I turned 16, our house caught on fire. We were camping at the lake at the time, but my dad was going into town to work every day. I remember sitting and giggling at the campsite, when my mother and aunt came running. We drove to town just in time to see the smoldering mess. My dad had been close by and was able to get a few, VERY few, things out including some family photo albums.

Even though it was a horrible event, there were two distinctly positive results. One, I’d been out the night before and uh…well..gotten a little tipsy. My mother had driven around the campsite until she found me sleeping it off in my boyfriend’s truck. I fell asleep to the sound of her yelling. Normally I would have been grounded till I died, but watching your house burn to the ground puts a mother’s mind onto other things. Yea, me!

The second was that lots of townspeople banded together and brought us stuff. Clothes, blankets, pots and pans, etc. I remember my mother looking like she’d rather be eating paint, but I just thought, “Cool, this is WAY better than the clothes I had before.” I was a very deep and thoughtful teenager.

Well,  I’ve had my own fire. The virus haven I call a computer was reformatted yesterday, and I promptly downloaded all my backup files. Only they weren’t there. Somehow, I’d put them in a place that the backup program couldn’t see. So all of my work files are GONE. My pictures, my designs, my ads over the last 9 months…up in smoke. And that book – the one I’ve been writing and revising and tweaking for years….well the last 9 months of it are no more.

I’ve pleaded, prayed, and puked to no avail. It’s as devastating as it gets, not including you know, real stuff like sickness and death.  What can you do, but get through it? I guess I’ll do  what my mother did. Cry a little, be glad for what’s left, hug my family.  AND save for a MAC!