Thursday, March 15, 2007

Two Muffins and Data Loss

No coffee, no music (though if I were listening to something it would be "Hell No, I Ain't Happy", by the Drive By Truckers) no light-up keyboard. Let's start with the bad. Last night as I went to send images of my work to the publisher for inclusion in the book, and I found I had accidentally deleted my entire library of pictures for the past year. Jessie, family, vacation and Siyeh Studio all moved to the trash and then deleted. So this morning I post from the desktop computer in the office. I wait to hear from a data recovery service I left a message for. My plate is already full as full can be today, and now I have to add a trek to the data recovery place and trying to work from the desktop. Sigh. There is no point talking about work today because it is grim, grim, grim. On to better topics.

This should probably be on Stranded in the South rather than here, but it lightens my mood and improves my morale for the day. Last night lying in bed, in those boneless few seconds right before sleep carried me away, my husband said, " So there are two muffins in an oven. The first muffin says, "Hey, it's getting warm in here." The second muffin says, "Holy shit, a talking muffin!" " I like to fell out of bed laughing (this is a southern phrase I am trying out since I live in the south. It's right up there with 'fixin' to'--another southernism I am working into my vocabulary). I told Dave that that was one of the funniest things I had ever heard. At which point he told me that many people don't really find this joke funny. I was frankly amazed.

Admittedly Dave told the joke when I was the most wide-open and receptive. In that seconds-before-sleep time I had already let go of the day's thoughts and not yet begun to dream. I was poised. When he told the joke, because my brain wasn't cluttered with other things, I immediately transformed it into a rich, complex parody of the human condition: We all go along cocooned in our own personal realities and belief systems and are startled when faced with other people's realities which aren't our own. It wasn't just funny, it was hysterically funny to me.

It's good to have a bright spot today.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well done, David!

I know for a fact that there is software that can deal with this, simply because the data is still on the hard drive; you computer is simply ignoring it. You just can't add anything to the computer else it will overwrite some of the data...

Anonymous said...

What Bill said ... and after you've recovered it, get an external hard drive and backup, backup, backup! I believe in redundancy ... I backup Richard's files on 3 different hard drives. Oh, maybe that's paranoidism. Good luck.

ren said...

if you really want to work on your southerisms, use my favorite. next time you go to turn off the light switch tell everyone you're "fixin' to cut off the light". it made me laugh everytime my roommate said it for four years of college.

she also said things like "i ain't done gone to suppah yit, but i got some livvah puddin' and some pim-e-ento cheeeeez spread heah..."

she was awesome.

Jodi said...

Ren's advice is bad. There is a reason why many Southerners sound ignorant. I worked so hard to lose my very Southern accent and phrases. I know assimilation can be comforting, but resist!