Copyright © 2006 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Return to lately 2006.

Christmas came early this year.

Christmas Eve, that time of wonderful smells in the kitchen, twinkling lights in the living room, rhyming radio songs throughout the house, my hard drive crashed.

I mean, totally crashed.

Although the tower was only inches from the rounded fronts of my shoes, trying to communicate with it was like trying to raise a signal from an unlit satellite wobbling around Pluto.

It was gone.

And gone with it was half a year's worth of work (I know, you're supposed to back-up your files periodically, and get a colonoscopy every year to make sure you don't have intestinal cancer).

So right now I'm adrift, trying to recreate my files from hardcopies, each night grabbing up into my arms, like a sleeping baby built like an accordion, another half-shelf of expandable folders, eight drawers of hardcopies in all.

I thought about calling out a hard drive recovery technician, but decided against. In the past, they've never been able to retrieve information for me from a crashed hard drive (and they charge the same amount whether they recover data or not. Where's the incentive?)

I had a fantasy where the tech came out, opened up my CPU, snuffled to himself a few times under my desk, then crawled backwards on his hands and knees out from under, looking up at me. "Well it's no wonder your hard drive doesn't work, Mr. Moore. The CPU case is stuffed with hundred dollar bills. There must be $50,000 in there. I've never seen anything like it in all my information technology years."

Anyway.

So this is another short Lately.

I wrote a really great Lately for January 1 in early December because Joe, Mary's dad, was arriving a week before Christmas, and I knew I wouldn't have time to write it after that, but, poof!

Pluto.