Grateful

Regular readers of this blog may remember that I lost all of my jpeg files last November when my external hard drive crashed. I wrote about it {here}, if you care to read. It’s short and sad. In early December, I took the device to one of the best computer experts in our area who, after several weeks, informed me that his staff could get nothing from it. I was sad, but I’m almost embarrassed to say it’s been sitting there ever since because I just couldn’t bring myself to go get it. Pretty lame, I know.

My husband has been bugging me lately about picking the darn thing up and the fact that it’s now been five months that I’ve left it in the shop. Most recently, his chiding occurred at dinnertime, to which our son joined in and said, “You really need to go get the thing, mom. Maybe we can get it working.”

Inwardly, I rolled my eyes but I agreed to go pick it up the next day.

And I couldn’t believe what happened.

The hard drive was shot, they told me. So I took it home and carried it into the house along with my camera bag, my handbag, my lunch bag, all the mail from the mailbox, and my coffee cup . . . and just as I was about to set the bag with the old EHD in it on the table, the thing slid out of my hands and onto the floor. Crash.

That’s it, I thought. Now I’d totally ruined it, as if it weren’t ruined to begin with.

I winced as I picked it up and placed it on the table. It was still sitting there when I left for work this morning.





These pictures you’re looking at were found this morning by my husband after he plugged in the old hard drive to his laptop and it started right up. He called me at work all excited and began telling me which photos he was looking at. He found 40 of the hundreds of files I had. And he says that tomorrow he thinks he might be able to find more.

I was shocked, to put it mildly.

It’s a miracle. Or maybe the miracle was in the dropping.





But this guy?

He did good today.

And when I came home, our son and I loaded everything we could find into a new EHD. The photos you see here were taken in April 2008, when we were still living at Northview Stallion Station in Chesapeake City.




After my husband had lost his job, and after everything that happened to us following those tough months, which turned into years, I couldn’t even bring myself to look at these images.

I got over it though – and I think it’s fitting that these files were some of the few to be recovered.

 

It’s nice to have photos of George as a puppy.

 

He’s 9 mos. old in this one.

 

 

 

And my stars, did he ever love this cat. I wrote a post about it here:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways on my paws

We thought the cat was a stray, but after the post was written, we found out that it actually lived on the farm in one of the other homes. It loved to visit our house every day and it would stay for hours. George adored this cat, and the feeling was quite mutual.

: : :

 

Today I’m thankful. It’s good to have some of my files back. And my husband is pretty proud of himself for the role he played in it.

Amen.




ps - in reading this back, I wanted to clarify that he found 40 folders. In those folders are hundreds of images, most of which were saved, and some of which were completely empty.