I finally made a bit of progress on my shop­ping. I’m not great about fig­ur­ing out what to buy for peo­ple. Usually, I like to think that I’m pretty obser­vant, and I can fig­ure out what makes them tick. But I can never fig­ure out what they want. My hus­band is the worst to shop for. Mostly because he wants noth­ing. He hates ask­ing for gifts, and the few things he does want, he wants to pick out him­self.

I did pick out a few things I think he’ll like. I need to go over what I have bought, since I can’t remem­ber it all, and then fig­ure out who’s left. I think I need some­thing more for my Mom.

My work sched­ules are start­ing to even out, so that they’re mostly the same every week. I’m able to plan around them now, instead of never know­ing. So there’s that, which makes it eas­ier to fig­ure out when I’m going to go shop­ping again. Wednesday, prob­a­bly, which is good, since we’re almost out of time!

Question to the read­ers: How is your Holiday shop­ping going?

It’s been over a month since I’ve read a book. Shocking, I’m sure, to any­one who knows me. I’ve been so busy with so many things, and so focused on a few other things that I just haven’t allowed myself the time.

Well, today I fin­ished part of my novel. I’m about half done. The mid­dle half, which is strange, but oh well. So that’s one big thing that I’ve been focused on done. I’m almost done with the baby blan­ket I’m mak­ing for a friend. She’s just had her baby, so it’s a good thing I’m almost done. So that’s another thing that’s been tak­ing up a lot of the lit­tle spare time I have.

We’re start­ing to get set­tled more into the house. There’s still a lot that needs to be done, of course, but it’s not really any­thing that has to be done imme­di­ately for us to live. The neces­si­ties are taken care of. Now, it’s just a mat­ter of rear­rang­ing things to our lik­ing and mak­ing things pretty. All that’s going to hap­pen over time, as we fig­ure out what we want, then as we save up the money to do what we’re going to do.

The next step for me is to plan out the next half of my novel, or really the first quar­ter and last quar­ter. I think first, I’m going to take a month or so to just read for a while. I’d like to catch up on some books that are wait­ing on my book­shelves. I have an entire 6′ book­case of books I haven’t read yet, I should at least try to make a dent in it.

Planning an out­line takes time. Mostly the ideas come in drips here and there, so I’m going to take my mini note­book around with me and see what comes up. It worked last time, and if you really think about it, I’ve writ­ten two books in thir­teen months. I con­sider them as parts now, but they’re going to be nov­els later on when I can do my next drafts.

All this adds up to mean that at my breaks at work, and at home at night, I can read! I’m really look­ing for­ward to it. I’m think­ing I might try to branch out a lit­tle from what I’ve been read­ing ‘lately’ and try some­thing new. Should be fun.

Question to the read­ers: What are you look­ing for­ward to these days?

First, after months of back and forth with it, my com­puter died of a moth­er­board cor­rup­tion. I had enough time to back every­thing up before it died com­pletely; I wasn’t too scarred from it. I was out $700 to get a replace­ment though.

Silly me bought the same com­puter, just the next model that they’d come out with. It works mostly okay, but I’ve had lit­tle issues with it not turn­ing on when you press the but­ton since I got it. My hus­band just thinks I’m paranoid.

Because of those lit­tle issues, I never took every­thing off my exter­nal drive that I’d put every­thing on from the old com­puter. I thought it would be safer that way.

Then we moved.

Then I tossed a bag of cat treats out of a box, onto my desk think­ing I’d deal with them later but I needed my hair­brush from the box I was dig­ging in. No, I don’t know why my hair­brush and the cat treats got put in the same box.

Then Mandy found where I tossed the treat bag and attacked it.

Then my exter­nal drive crashed to the floor.

Now, I’ve spent a whole day and more try­ing to get it to work. It won’t.

The com­puter doesn’t rec­og­nize it as an option in what used to be called my com­puter. I go into disk man­age­ment, and it is there. It’s just unal­lo­cated. It doesn’t have a let­ter assigned to it. I looked up some help sites online and they all said to try par­ti­tion­ing the drive. It’s write pro­tected and I can’t change any­thing about it. Apparently that’s a com­mon error on these types of dri­ves to do that with no warning.

I’m scared that I’ll lose every­thing. That I’ve already lost everything.

My pic­tures, which include those of my nieces when they were babies, my cats from kit­ten to now, my wed­ding, my friends’ wed­ding, trips, us, things around the house, the new house before we moved in, the old apart­ment, hol­i­days, fam­ily. All my music. My files, my bud­get, bill back­ups, site back­ups, quilt back­ups, game saves, games and pro­grams. Literally every­thing I’d decided to keep when prepar­ing to lose my old com­puter, my list of pass­words to sites I don’t use much … and now don’t remem­ber that I’ve signed up at. About 600GB worth of stuff.

The only thing I won’t lose is the cur­rent file for my novel. I will lose the out­line, but I do have a printed copy. My old school­work files. My old writ­ing files. The files and scans from buy­ing my house. Some of my music that I’d already trans­ported to the new com­puter. And any­thing that I have on CD still, music and game wise.

My only hope is that my hus­band can fix it. I don’t know what he can do though that I haven’t already tried. He hasn’t got­ten to it yet. He’s been really sick for almost two weeks now, and is just start­ing to get over his bron­chi­tis and pneumonia.

I don’t have the money to take it some­where for a data recov­ery. I tried one I found online, but the com­puter doesn’t rec­og­nize it as hav­ing a drive let­ter, so I can’t select to drive to recover the files from.

Question to the read­ers: Any idea what I can do?