Well Bloggers, it was a Busy week end. Friday night after work, we went to a production of an improvisational theatrical mystery. Fun as it turned out. Saturday after dog walking, we went to Lakeland for Stephen and Casey's baby shower. Got back in time to stop by Ikea for shopping and Swedish meatballs. Sunday we cleared out the last stuff at Mom's house, then met friend Karen at Donatos pizza.
All was well until Danny decided to upgrade my desktop computer which runs Linux Ubuntu to the new Hearty heron program. Like updating Mac to Jaguar or Windows to Vista. Well, he wiped all clean, installed the bird thing and then I discovered he'd forgotten to save the files on my desktop screen. What was up there you might wonder? Well, mostly unimportant stuff...and the ONLY file I had of my poetry book manuscript. The manuscript that was one last line and one last content edit away from sending off to the publisher.
No, I didn't get mad or cry or yell. Danny was tired. Anybody can make a mistake. And he felt real bad about it. I did feel sick and panicky and, well, like somebody had punched me in the gut. Punched me hard.
Then I had a dim memory of putting one of the versions of the manuscript on my jump drive. Thankfully it was there. A fairly recent version, without the edits and final formatting and missing four poems I have in my poetry file. But close enough to keep me in business. I've lost some weeks of editing and formatting work, but not the book. So, its okay.
Lesson here folks. Keep multiple copies of everything. On jump drives, discs, hard copies, X drive. Whatever. Just keep multiples. Always. Update those copies too.
Chili ripped up Danny's good backpack stealing sandwiches and Zone bars. Guess she hasn't figured out zippers yet.
Live long and prosper.
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