A New Goal and Catching Up

My new goal is to check in with my blog once a week. Trying to balance work, home, writing, etc with online stuff line Facebook, MySpace, TrekSpace, AdoptionVoices, and Blogger is quite hard. So I wrote a Hubpages article about in which I suggested I might do one of those social networkingish things for each weekday. So Monday, is supposed to be MySpace, but I'm bored and my internet connection is slow today. So I thought I'd go ahead and blog today instead.

Let's catch up now. I've been gone from here for some time. I...ahem, Philippe... takes forever to post a chapter etc. Well, something catastrophic happened in June that made us both even slower. One of my hard drives crashed. I mean CRASHED. It made sounds. The BIOS could see it and call it bad. Windows could not see it. That drive held, in order of importance: my writing, my websites, and all my e-mail for the last decade or so.

Yes, I lost my writing. Oh, I have my stories on the internet in places besides my own hosted site. So I have the stories, at least in HTML format. But I also lost something very precious to me along with the stories: feedback. All my feedback since 1996 (with the exception of those lost in the Great Hard Drive Confusing of 2001). You'd think I'd know to back up my stuff. I "know". Knowing doesn't always translate into doing. I had backed up once or twice to a CD but I can't find it. I might have had some stuff on floppies. Sure. But I can't read ANY floppy anymore. None. Not even the one with the $300 data recovery software that saved 95% of my stuff from the GHDC in 2001.

This was a major blow to my psychy. So I've been creatively paralyzed. I can say that Philippe did manage to write 2 scenes of Chapter 15. Yep, 2 scenes in 2 months. 2 months since the hard drive crash. Not sure how long it has been since he posted Chapter 14.

On a good note, I thought about how I had transferred all that data to it's home on the crashed drive. It spent some time on our external hard drive. So I fired up an undelete program and looked. I could see everything! I couldn't open everything. Most of it was corrupt. I was from back in 2008. But I was able to open some of my reviews. I was able to find some story parts (especially for unfinished stories) on my laptop. I also found my poetry. I got all my fanfiction.net reviews from fanfiction.net (Well, not all. They got reset some years back). I scoured 13 years of alt.startrek.creative through GoogleGroups to find feedback and awards posts there. I was able to copy down an older copy of my websites from Bravenet where I'd temporarily hosted them when my webserver was down. Last week, I rebuilt my feedback database and copied into it what I had of my If It's Not One Thing.... feedback.

In adoption news, we finished our home study update. We're waiting on agency approval now. Hopefully this will be faster than it was with WACAP. On the bad side though, our adoption agency has lost its permit to adopt in Russia due to administrative document issues I won't go into. So we're slowed down by that.

We've raised over $19,000 by this point. We've spent just under $6,000. Rob works seasonally at the IRS and the season is over. So we've dropped in income until he finds another full-time job. (Or a couple more part-time ones.) His PT job at Pizza Hut, together with unemployment, is keeping us afloat. We are presently still paying what we want to pay on our bills (to pay them down) and saving (albeit less) for the adoption.

So that's where I am. I'd like to go after one of the data recovery places I sent my drive to. They put a fingerprint and dust on the platter. NOT PROFESSIONAL. Besides, it raises the cost of recovering my data and makes it less likely to be successful. We can't pay $1500 to try to get data off that drive.

Status of Stories

• Philippe's Alien Us Patiently waiting the end to creative paralysis 2 scenes into Chapter 15.
  
• Purgatory Still there. Yes, I saved the two chapters that exist.
  
• The Honored Also saved, and still on that back burner, simmering slowly.