love/hate relationship

I am recovering from a hard drive crash and whew, what a pain that was. Interestingly I had just bought an external hard drive backup in January and had been faithfully using it, but when it came down to it, for some reason, it had only backed up the computer files the first time - in January. The "restore" disk I'd made two copies of didn't work (and the Best Buy repair guys were the ones to attempt to use it - though that is a whole 'nother story as they took 6 days to do what should have taken 2! I was not impressed at all).

Luckily, I also had all the important files saved on CD. In the end, I needed them! Make backups of your backups is the bottom line... In the end the most debilitating thing was that I lost 3 months worth of emails, & since email is "work" this was really frustrating. I have lost several people's email addresses though if I had them in my Address book I got it... not anyone recent.

The other thing was the cost - eegads. I have to work super duper extra hard now (hence I am up at 2am cranking out the queries...)! It sucks eggs. So, computers... they make me want to jump up and down on top of them in frustration. But I can't live without it! It's a true love/hate relationship.

Next week I fly to southern Florida for the Scripps Environmental Journalism Institute that I was selected for - we'll visit the Everglades (which I am writing about in an article) and other places. The program looks way cool and I am super excited to visit a friend from "ConGen" (Conservation Genetics workshop) from a couple years back. I'll hang out a couple extra days after it ends, and visit my sea turtle biologist bud Kelly - we're going to go see nesting sea turtles (one of my favorite things in the world)!! I've seen them in Australia, Costa Rica, California, Hawaii, and Texas... amazing creatures.

(PS photo of Elephant Butte Lake, NM)