*Sob* *Sob* *Sob*

I lost it all. All my fics. All of them. At least I had my novel saved on a disk, but not the revises I did to chapter one... all gone, all gone! *wails*

If any of you have any part of "An Extraordinary Girl," please, please, please email it to me!

It turned out to be one of those stupidly simple things. The day before yesterday, it was my turn to make dinner. I was making my mom's version of beans and rice. I got my habit of tinkering with recipes from my mother, by the way. One cannot ask for a recipe from my mother without understanding that. Otherwise, she'll plonk a cookbook down in front of you and say, "here, this is the recipe I used for that dish you liked so much," and you'll copy it down, go home, make it, following the recipe exactly, and be disappointed when it is nothing at all like what she made. What you have to do is look at the recipe in the cookbook to learn the outlines, then look back at her and say, "Okay, but how do YOU make it?" And then she'll give you the real recipe. Well... as best as she can do it, considering there are always variables that occur on any given day to change one or another ingredient.

I've basically got that beans and rice recipe memorized,but sometimes, I have to go check to make sure I'm not forgetting something. I keep my recipes on a floppy disk, a habit that is changing today. *growls* I popped it in, brought it up, checked it over, then hurried back in the kitchen to add what I had forgotten (olive oil). I forgot to pop the disk out.

Okay, so later that night, the computer was acting up and I knew we had adware or spyware interfering with function again. So I ran our anti-spyware software, and rebooted. Except... the computer wouldn't reboot. An error message kept popping up that NTSD loader couldn't be found. The Husbandly One looked over my shoulder and said, "Ooooohhhhh, that is SOOOO not good."

Cut a long story short, we used our recovery disk to no avail, and The Husbandly One decided to talk to some of the tech geeks at work to see what we could do. When he got home, we both went exhaustively over every single damn thing we had done over the last three days on that computer, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, because the error message just didn't add up. And you know, because I write what I write, we couldn't exactly take it somewhere to be fixed! *laughs*

So, because of a message I had seen earlier that day telling me some network connection or other was disabled, we took the damn thing apart and were appalled at the dusty mess inside. It was cleaned, put back together, and it was when the Husbandly One was pushing it back into place that he saw the floppy disk and popped it out, saying, "What is this?"

And lo, the lights of heaven shone down, choruses of angels began to sing, and the computer REBOOTED ALL BY ITSELF!!!

Well, not exactly, but pretty close. Then... we realized the hard drive had been completely wiped.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!

All my fics! All my pictures! My music!! My artwork!!!

I got drunk last night.

Not as drunk as I WANTED to, but pretty close.

I worked so HARD on those things, and... the revises!!

*is completely devastated*

I sobbed all over the Husbandly One and got his shirt absolutely disgusting. He just held me and patted me, murmuring soothingly to me, and then took me out to Henry's for Belgian Chocolate Cheesecake, because chocolate makes EVERYTHING better. Though... not quite. I almost asked for two pieces because I figured, well, if I eat TWO pieces, the chocolate is so rich I'm sure to get the Migraine From Hell, and when I wake up from my coma in six weeks, it will be a whole new world.

I think I'm gonna go cry some more.

This completely and totally sucks.

PS. To onewavebreaks... thank you so much for the rose! It helped. You are such a sweetie! *hugs*