If you're reading this, stop now and back up your data.
Two weeks ago (hence the absence) my iMac died a sudden and painful death. The hard drive erased itself. Erased. Gone. I did not have anything "backed up". Suddenly I feel like a total moron, like Carrie in that SATC episode where her laptop dies.
I still can't even bear to talk to anyone about it. All those photos. Nearly five years worth of pictorial memories are lost forever, dissolved into thin air. Of course, I am upset about losing all our photographs documenting our life in Sydney, but what pains me the most is the loss of pictures from the last three months - the first three months of Eulalies birth (including her birth and the minutes and hours following). I do have some images that I can salvage from this blog and from emailed pictures sent to friends and family. But the pictures I miss the most aren't the ones where the lighting was nice, or it was framed well, or she was smiling in that one - it was all the everyday moments and rituals, images that wouldn't really impress anyone - but to us they were magical.
Of course, in the big scheme of things, this is hardly a big deal. There are people all over the world who have lost everything in these devastating Natural disasters that have been occurring in the last few months. A few photos is nothing. We have our health, our family, our home.
Oh, well - a fresh start. My computer took more than four days to be repaired, and the store policy promised that after the fourth day, the repair was free. So I guess there's the silver lining.
