In Which Aristophanes Takes a Tumble

You may have noticed that I’ve been noticeably absent from my blog lately, and I feel dreadful about it. I promised you tons and tons of new posts (and believe me, there is plenty to write about), and yet I have not delivered on any of them. I feel as rotten as a politician.

But I have an excuse.

Well, several excuses, really, but there is one big one that totally takes the cake. Beyond the whole “I’m busy” excuse (which, ironically, seems to be the same excuse that keeps interfering in my love life) – involving moves across oceans and countries, working reunions and partying with Wellesley alums, getting a driver’s license, getting in touch with old friends, and just trying to be available for a family which really does need their daughter’s help – there is something much deeper at work here.

Aristophanes, my beloved computer, broke. Again.



This is not the first time that my dear, sweet, amazing, sexy laptop took a tumble. The last major problem led to a new motherboard and new memory. This time around, though, it seems that the love of my life was out for blood: the hard drive failed.

In all honestly, I knew this was coming. Aristophanes had been dropping warnings left and right. Files were corrupting, the bios and Windows were taking a long time to boot, and things just weren’t running as smoothly as they once had. I should have had the foresight to back up all of my files. Yeah, shoulda, woulda, coulda. The point is, in a bout of impressive laziness and astounding forgetfulness, I failed to back up my computer with my (literally) thousands of images from France. Not to mention my music, my writing (which is mostly backed up, actually), and some important documents for school and life in general.

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to cry over a piece of technology before.

Most of my life flashed before my eyes as I thought of the gigabytes upon gigabytes that might potentially be lost forever. I managed to get a new hard drive through Dell that was covered under my warranty, and my family bought a copy of Windows 7 for me to install on my computer, so I soon had most things up and running again. However, I still hadn’t made any attempts to recover the data on the dead drive. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to salvage anything and that so many memories would be lost to hard drive heaven (or hell, I suppose).

In the end, though, I pulled my act together, mostly thanks to my dad, and took my hard drive to San Diego PC Help, where they told me that they could do a full recovery of all the data on my drive.

Huzzah!

In the immortal words of Buffy Summers, “We saved the world. I say we party.”

Now, while I have yet to receive all the data from my old hard drive and confirm that everything is indeed there, I am fairly confident that I am going to get my hands on all my important pictures and not lose all the lovely images of my year abroad. I suppose that we shall just have to wait and see, but I am choosing to be optimistic here.

So there you have it. No pictures = no updates. I don’t want to present you with massive amounts of text that, while possibly descriptive and accurate emotional descriptions of my experiences, just wouldn’t do justice to anything without some sort of personal visual aid. Therefore, expect more posts soon, dear reader, for I will eventually have my pictures sitting at my fingertips (backed up about six times), ready to be posted in awe-inspiring posts about Italy, England, and beyond!

Aristophanes has been my loyal companion for three years now, and though she has been a frustrating  and unruly mistress at times, I just can’t imagine giving her up for another model.

…I sound as though I am writing about a transsexual computer from Ancient Greece. Well, I suppose we all have our quirks.

Until the next entry, dear reader.

Bisous,
Rachel