Something terrible happened to me during December, which I failed to chronicle here: I lost my external hard drive.
This was a big deal because I had ALL of my photos and music on said hard drive. In early December I had FORTUNATELY and randomly decided to burn all of my photos to DVD, so I actually didn't lose a single photo. Still, I lost all of my music that wasn't loaded on my iPhone. That was a lot of music. Hundreds of albums worth. I spent a lot of time downlo... I mean, buying that music in college.
I tore my house apart on several occasions trying to look for it and had no success. I checked with public transit to see if I left it behind one day on the train. No luck.
You know that feeling when you can't find your keys and you're late to work? Multiply that feeling by five and extend it for weeks. I was devastated. My hard drive must have joined my Star Wars lightsaber in the lost bin.
(Tangent: Scott and I dressed up as Star Wars characters the Halloween after college. He was Darth Vader, I was Obi-Wan Kenobi. We had state-of-the-Toys'R'Us-art lightsabers as props. Our costumes were sick and everyone was super jealous of us. At the parties we attended people kept asking us to duel, which we gladly obliged to in our drunken states. Long after Halloween I got into a habit of bringing out the lightsaber and hitting The Wives with it. One day it went missing. I unconditionally accused them (namely Katrine) of throwing it away, until a day a couple years later when I found it in the back of my closet when I was moving out of the Ballard Burrow. Now I have a habit of hitting Amanda with it. The legacy continues...)
So I moved on. I downlo... I mean, bought some new music and restored photos back to my computer from the DVDs. I splurged on Black Friday and bought TWO new external hard drives. (Like women with shoes, I can never have enough hard drives.) I was again content.
Remember how I painted those kitchen cupboards? Yeah, well on Monday night I found that lost hard drive in the back corner of the tallest cupboard. I must have hid it from myself in the interest of safety and paranoia.
I was happy to have recovered some of the lost music, but I didn't really need it anymore. Like an old ex, I grateful for the storage we shared but had upgraded and moved on. It wasn't the hard drive, it was me.
I learned two important lessons during the Lost Hard Drive Fiasco of 2009:
1. ALWAYS back up your data, twice over.
2. When something valuable is lost (like a hard drive or lightsaber) clean out your cupboards and closets. Something is bound to be found.