All wet in Chicagoland…

Geeze, Louise has it been bucketing down. Thunder and lightening are rumbling through gray skies and the rain drops are dancing on my roof at night. I love it! My father in law Ed calls this kind weather, ‘gling-glong’ days. Today as it rained fairly hard, I drove over to the library to return some books. On the way out, the parking lot was so puddled with running water, I just took off my sandals and barefooted it back to my car. The cool rain water felt great splashing between my toes…it was a little simple pleasure I haven’t been able to experience much this summer. We havent’ had a lot of rain, and this last week has been very wet, to say the least.

Last night, when I went to sleep, the thunder and lightening was pretty bad. I woke up to a very scary scene when I came downstairs for my morning coffee. As I sat down to read my emails, that dreaded ‘blue screen’ was glaring back at me and it was telling me, quite ominously that my hard drive had crashed. I suddenly had a pain in the pit of my stomach. All I could think of is how I haven’t backed up my Hootin Annie’s patterns in about 2 years and now I was going to live to regret it.

Long story short, my husband, the software, hardware, IT, computer programmer guy told me to take out the hard drive, plug it into his computer and he would try to boot it up and see if it was salvagable. After about 10 minutes of glitches, scares and sweating at the brow, my hard drive came up! I immediately sat and saved my entire C drive to a DVD and rescued my entire BUSINESS. Just thinking about having to find hard copies of all my patterns, rescan and redo almost all 90 of them was enough to make me want to throw in the towel. And now that I have my feature in Country Living Magazine this November, this is not the time to lose my livelihood.
All I can say is THANK YOU JESUS!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I find out last night that my digital camera is broken! I accidentally dropped it one foot from the floor, but I suppose that was enough to break the LCD inside it. I can’t be without my camera. It’s something I use almost daily for personal, blog and business use. I went to Staples today and picked up a new model Kodak 8.0 megapixel camera. I can’t wait to open the box up tonight and try it out. I had to sneak this purchase…the hubby doesn’t know, and I hope he’ll never find out. He’s not too observant, so odds are good he won’t notice a bit. This time, when I purchased it, I also bought the insurance for 3 years that protects me against damages to the camera from, you guessed it–drops! Yes, If I drop my camera any time in the next 3 years and it breaks, Staples will replace my camera for free. I’m sure I’ll be using this insurance policy! No doubt.

It’s been like three days and the thunder is still rumbling in the skies and the rain continues. I’m off to lie in bed and listen to the rain hit my rooftop once again. While you’re reading this, why don’t you do yourself a favor and back up your hard drive. I wouldn’t want you to wake up to that dreaded blue screen someday and wish someone would have reminded you to backup all of your precious computer stuff. After you’re done, you might wish you had a copy of the movie Evan Almighty to curl up on the couch to. If this rain continues, I might just start looking for an ark to rescue me.