The one with the pictures, part 2

I know that you must be just absolutely DYING to know what became of my pictures. You know, the fact that I couldn't find them? Well, I still can't find them on the CD, and I keep looking around for another CD even though I know I didn't make another CD. I guess I hope that maybe I just got drunk one night and decided to make a backup of all my pictures and that's why I don't remember ever using another CD. Riiiiiight. Like that's what I'd do if I got that drunk, as opposed to go dancing with young beautiful people who are 22 and pretend that I am also young, beautiful and 22 when in fact I am old, fat, and 29 with too-large pores and bags under my eyes. But, that's a story for another day, or maybe never.

Back to the topic at hand. The pictures did not make the transfer over from one hard drive to the other. I am kicking myself because while my hard drive was in fact failing, it made all the right squawking noises and failed all the right tests for the nice folks at Dell Customer Support to decide that it did indeed need to be replaced. But, then, as a miracle from God, it began working again, though it was very temperamental. But this gave me a chance to make sure I had all the files I needed backed up, etc. (I just realized I started the last two sentences with "but", my old English teachers must be so proud) So, you'd think with this "second chance" at ensuring I had the data I needed, something like this wouldn't have happened. However, that kind of statement doesn't take into account my stupidity.

God even gave me a second chance. Part of the warranty system with Dell is that you get the nice shiny new refurbished part and must return the old crappy dysfunctional one or you will be billed an exorbitant price for the replacement. So, I received the new part on a Friday. But, my computer was working correctly, and I didn't want to ruin that, so I was lazy and did not perform the transfer of hard drives for nearly 10 days. I finally switch them out, package up the old one and send it off. Now, a smart person would have pulled down that CD with the backup files and immediately transferred them to the new computer. Ha! I still haven't done that. I just stick it in the drive when I need one of them, because it's so much harder to drag and drop that file folder so it's there when I need it.

Ah, yes, the point of this, where did it go? I didn't do that. I didn't need any of those files, so I didn't look at the contents. How does this little side-story connect to the notion of a second chance? Because God sent my old hard drive back! The one that was still working when I sent it in, and so I could have simply removed the new one, put in the old one again, burned a CD of the pictures I wanted to keep and then called Dell to tell them they are morons for returning the old hard drive to me because they are too stupid to put the correct address on the pre-printed label!!! But, no, I hadn't looked at the CD, didn't know I didn't have the pictures, and so I just arranged again to have it picked up by UPS. Of course, I noticed the next day. I wondered if UPS had the ability to do a "stop delivery" similar to a "stop payment" option at the bank. Decided it would be too embarrassing.

So, after I mourned their loss for a while, I decided to get proactive. I could go through my sent email folder (yay! for once the fact that I never clean out my email pays off!!) and see if anyone still had a copy of my favorite pictures and while doing that realized that it saves all those files in there. (Thank you Yahoo! I will forget about all the propositions for mortgage refinancing and p*nis enlargement for a few minutes and appreciate you!) I am a prolific picture emailer. So pretty much all of my favorite pictures had been emailed to at least one person. I managed to save 55 of those old pictures that way. I vacillate between thrilled and slightly embarrassed that I had emailed 55 different pictures to people. I almost always end up back at thrilled. The only copy of the best hair day I've ever had was in there. And that alone is reason to celebrate.