Over The Hump

You know those times when you’ve been behind the 8-ball for what feels like forever, perhaps beginning to despair that you might not ever catch up with your suddenly-ballooning finances? Somehow, after a major expenditure, it seems like everything comes due at the same time and what seemed like a pretty great idea a month ago has had you privately second guessing yourself ever since.

Then, along comes that unmistakable day where things finally start to feel right again: the highest hurdle has been cleared, and looking down the path ahead, you begin to realize that everything is actually going to get better from here on out. For me, that day was today.

I'm not going to be out of the woods for a while yet, maybe the end of July, but the Saturn passing E-check today (despite the presence of a hole in the exhaust system that only made itself known over the last five or so days) was a tremendous relief nonetheless. Now that the car is finally legal, I can start lining up and systematically dispatching waiting bills and ratcheting down the stress to a far more manageable level. Life can be pretty dramatic, and I should be familiar with this feeling, but it feels wonderfully new everytime it happens.

Of course, not everything came up completely rosy today: I have now lost my second Western Digital "My Book" external hard drive in the last six months and I am absolutely furious with that once-trusted company. As with everything else in this increasingly disposable world of electronics, the new model crap withers and dies while the older models soldier ever onwards: my oldest WD drive (a pre-My Book era dinosaur) is not only is it still working wonderfully in its current capacity as electronic jukebox for the Record Den, but also taking a fair amount of abuse doing so. How surprising.

Luckily, my friend Dave has most of the data on this drive already saved from the last time I had a drive fail, and that dead HD had ironically been migrated to this one. Assuming Dave can save what needs to be saved from what was so recently known as Drive K, I face a bit of a data-archiving quandary in that I have 3 other "My Book" drives still active and all of them nearly full-to-bursting with data. Obviously, I can no longer trust any of these drives not to fail in the near future and I will need to figure out a non-WD solution as to how I'm going to backup these drives before taking great pleasure in destroying them. For now, they are going to be used as little as possible until I can back everything up safely to DVD-R for a least a short-term solution (a project that has started in earnest as I write this post).

Lessons learned today:

1. Life does not always suck nose. There are indeed times when all is well ... or at least trending that way.

2. Never slack off on backing up your data, people: especially the important stuff you can't live without.

3. Fuck you, Western Digital. Seriously. Go take a long walk off a short pier.