Arrrggghh!!!

So, I have been absent from blogging recently for good reason.  We went on our trip to the San Francisco Bay Area to visit my family and see some sites since my husband had never been up there before.  Naturally, I turned off the computer because we were going to be gone for a while.  When we  got back, it turned on, but wouldn't go to the Windows start up screen where you put in your password and stuff.  Come to find out, through a couple of people, our harddrive had crashed.  The first thing my husband asked me was when was the last time I had backed up any pictures onto a cd?  I couldn't remember, it had been a long time.   I sobbed.  I couldn't believe it, all those pictures lost!  We are hoping that if we send it to this recovery place that they will be able to get some of our stuff back, but you never know.  A fraction of the pictures are here on the blog and my facebook account, but that is just it, it's only a fraction.  A good friend of ours took out the old one and put in a new one he had and loaded the new version of Windows for us.  I have been bummed out for a while about this whole thing and once I get through this week, then I should be able to do a blog about our California trip.  Now what we are doing is carbonite.com.  Right now we are on the free trial as we just got our computer back, but it is only 55 dollars a year to have your information backed up off site.  So, if something happens to your computer, stolen, or hard drive crash-once you get your new one, you just log into your account with them and there it all is.  My biggest fear since the first time I got a digital camera, was that something like this could happen and it did, I am just grateful that it happened after my husband graduated and that I have some of the pictures elsewhere so that not all is lost.  It is a very odd feeling, realizing how much we take technology for granted and liberally trust it with our most precious memories and information and it can all be gone so quickly.  I encourage you to look into an external harddrive or carbonite.com, something that can save your pictures and memories where they won't get lost forever.  I did get lucky with one thing, apparently I haven't erased the pictures off my camera for a while, so when I went to load what I had onto our new harddrive, I was surprised to find that from the beginning of September until now I have pictures from, 513 pictures that were there.  I am thankful for the little things and grateful to have enough people around me that know about computers to get the problem fixed.