But first, I'm relieved just to be back online. A few days ago my hard drive crashed, and it looked like everything was gone. By everything I mean hundreds of emails, photos, pictures and countless personal documents accumulated over the past two decades, including resumes, letters, blog posts, humour columns, poetry, quotations, my inventory of Etsy items to sell, and probably most important of all, any and every idea for future posts on this blog. To say I was in shock is an understatement. And then grief set in. Because even though the loss of things isn't as bad as losing a loved one, losing what I created and have yet to create still left me reeling.
Also, I'm lost without my computer. That's where I read, write, correspond, and pay bills, buy, sell, view, research, check weather, TV listings, post photos.... In short, that's where I live.
Luckily for me, my tech guy (aka oldest brother), is an electrical engineer by day and a computer fixer-upper whiz by night, and after working incredibly hard the whole weekend was able to retrieve and repair my sub hard drive where I had saved all of my personal stuff. And yes, we immediately backed up everything on a new main drive as well should a calamity like this happen again. We never did determine the exact cause of hard drive death (although it was definitely mechanical and not viral), and in his many years of fixing this is now known as Biggest Computer Headache Ever, but boy am I lucky. The moral of this story though? Back up, BACK UP, BACK UP.
Okay, dates.
- October 1: National "Cut Out Dissection" Month begins
- October 1: World Vegetarian Day
- October 2: World Day for Animals on Farms
- October 2: Mahatma Ghandi's birthday
- October 6: Niagara Walk for Farm Animals (Ontario, Canada)
- October 8: Columbus Day
- October 8: Indigenous People's Day
- October 8: Thanksgiving is Murder on Turkeys Day (Canada)
- October 21: International Day of Peace
- October 21: (wouldn't it be nice if it was Interspecies Day of Peace as well?)
- October 2_: yours truly officially becomes half a century young ;)
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