And the moral is…

We have had a really strange weekend.

Parts of it were very good. Parts were very, very bad.

The good: We had a nice visit with the Webmaster’s parents and extended family on Saturday. The Munchkin also got to try roller skating, and she has inherited both her daddy’s and my genes in that area. The skates were a little too big, and she couldn’t really control where she was going, but she had balance, determination, and some undeniable skill. And she LOVED it. The Webmaster and I both donned roller skates for a little bit ourselves as well, but my skates were too big for my feet and I felt really clunky. I didn’t fall down, though!

Also good: Went to the bridal shower yesterday, which was very pleasant and had yummy food. I’m glad I went.

The very bad: The Webmaster did a system update on the computer Saturday night after we returned from his parents’, and somehow, though the two programs have nothing to do with each other, the upgrade deleted our entire photo gallery from Picasa 2. The last backup the Webmaster had done was from mid-July. So, he stayed up all night frantically trying to retrieve what he could, and we began canvassing family and friends to see what they might have. Thankfully, my own files were unaffected, so pictures that I had posted on the blog or sent via email were saved – albeit in a smaller, resized format, but we are just going to have to work with what we’ve got. My uncle was kind enough to send us everything that he had from Tad’s first birthday party, which was a lot of good stuff. My mother remembered that the Webmaster had downloaded a lot of pictures of Little Cousin’s August visit to their system, which the Webmaster copied and re-loaded into Picasa. My mother-in-law has some pictures from events that we lost. A few more recent pictures had been printed once, so they were saved in the Walgreens’ system. Sadly, we lost a lot that are simply unrecoverable, and there were many cute ones of the kids that are gone. But, we’re moving forward, thankful that it was only a few months’ worth of photos, a portion of them were successfully recovered, and that I had posted so many pictures on the blog.

The moral of the story is: Always do a backup BEFORE a system update. Because no matter how much you think one thing won’t affect the other, it just might. Also, do regular backups to a safe location. And maybe, just maybe, we should print pictures more often.

Still, as I pointed out to the Webmaster, we still have healthy, happy kids to take pictures of. We still have their baby pictures. We didn’t lose everything. It was only a few months of pictures, and we’ve gotten some of it back. And the memories won’t disappear. While this was bad and sad for us, my mother commented that there is only one baby picture of her late father in existence, because the rest were lost in a house fire many years ago. A college friend of the Webmaster’s lost her wedding photos and her first son’s baby photos in an apartment fire some years ago. We are doing everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen again to us, EVER. In the meantime, the rest of you – learn from this. Do a backup. Keep it current. You will never regret the time you take to do it. And if anyone has suggestions as to where the best place is to store photos online, or how you keep your own stuff protected, I would really love to hear it.

On a much lighter note, a charming little example of reverse psychology…

We went to my parents’ house last night so the Webmaster could recover pictures from their system. The Munchkin was drinking some milk at the kitchen table and coloring.

Auntie: “Finish your milk, Munchkin.”
Munchkin: “No!”
Gichan (my father): “Munchkin, finish your milk later.”
Munchkin: “Okay.” (drinks the last of her milk)
Auntie: (staring in shock at our grinning father) “I hate you.” (this was said tongue-in-cheek, trust me!)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 1:47 am and is filed under Children, Husbands, Uncategorized.
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