Have you seen Victor Infante’s November 3rd online journal? The Summer 2006 Edition is up and I’m one of a handful of writers/poets taking part in a Q&A called “Nobody’s Heroes.” It’s a fun read in which we talk about heroes in fiction.

Pat Guiver, author of the Delilah Doolittle pet detective series that began in the late ’90s, died a few days ago. She was from Surrey, England, and had a dry sense of humor and a great laugh. I was in a critique group (The Fictionaires) with her until a few years ago when I left the group. She was a wonderful critic and writer. I hadn’t seen Pat in quite some time, but already I miss her presence on this earth. Here’s a link to her obituary.

Apple is quick. I sent my laptop to Apple late last Thursday and it just arrived home. Impressive, the turnaround time.

Now, I have to load software and bring back all that lost data from the external hard drive. Hopefully that will all happen today.

So, y’all have been backing up your disks, right? What did you use?

It’s 8:20 on a Friday morning. I’m in my 11-year-old’s room, which is dark and cool in the morning (and glaringly hot in the afternoon when the sun switches places in the sky). He’s at school (one week left in the 6th grade … eeek!) and so I sit at his desk, which is an IKEA angular job that fits in the corner. The PC’s monitor takes up a quarter of the desk space. I really must buy a flat screen for this computer, or get rid of it–when my iBook comes home and when I buy a back up Mac. I’m not complaining; at least I have a computer not so vintage that I can at least get online and work some.

One thing I love about being in this room and working at this computer is the lava lamp that sits to the left of the monitor. In the morning, when I come into this wonderfully dim space, I turn on the computer and I also switch on the lava lamp. As it begins to heat up, the purple globular mass begins to shift, and within an hour and a half transforms from looking like a brain to, well, looking like lava. That’s a wonderful moment, when the wax or plastic or whatever it is in side the liquid becomes almost liquid itself.

Who ever has occasion to watch a lava lamp do what it does? I didn’t–until my Mac crashed and I was forced to work on this computer again.

On this computer is where I wrote those early drafts of PEN ON FIRE (they’re backed up on floppy disk–remember those?). I used to work in this room before Travis was born. Actually, I worked in here after he was born, too, because he slept in our room for a Long Time. Nursing…the family bed(a la Dr. Sears), etc….. I always liked it here.

I asked Travis if, when my Mac comes home, if I can use his desk to work. It will be summer. He’ll have little occasion to use the desk. He said he’d rent it to me, then he went on to say that he’d be happy to move into the living room if I wanted his room.

That’s doubtful, I said.

Wherever I end up working, the hard disk crash gave me the experience of remembering how I so liked to work in dark spaces facing the wall, how too much sun in a room, and too big a room, can cause my thoughts to become diffuse.

It was an expensive way to learn this simple fact. And to learn that wherever I work, I want a lava lamp with me, too.

So now, $1680 later, the laptop has had its data recovered–something like 497,000 files–and I have a new external hard drive holding all that data, and laptoppie-poo is on its way to Apple for a new hard drive.

An expensive lesson, for sure. But with all the minor and major horrors going on all around us, I feel lucky that that’s all it was. Odd reaction, maybe. But I’m not freaking out.

My back up plan for my new hard drive is in place, though.

It’s going to cost $1580 to recover data from my iBook–more than the iBook cost. What a pain. But what is there to do? For a minute I felt the way I’ve heard people talk about feeling when they lose everything in a fire: They feel free. No more garage to clean out (because the hardest part of cleaning out a garage is making decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of).

So I felt free there for a minute. But then, like those fire victims, I remembered all the photos we have stored on iPhoto and berated myself for not printing them or storing them online and thought, that would be the worst part of losing all the data (along with a email and Word docs, of course).

So I approved the work and any second, transferred money, and any second I will be $1580 poorer and my computer will be on the so-called road to recovery.

The data recovery company will give me my data on a hard drive and I can then use that to back up. My friend, tech guru Elizabeth Crane (writes the Tech Talk column for the ASJA Monthly, which I edit and which can be read at www.asja.org) says she has software that is on her Mac and once a week backs up to a hard drive that is always connected.

As for photos, I’ve started uploading photos from 2001 from this vintage PC that I’m typing on right now that sits on my son’s desk onto Kodak Gallery and I’ll pay them something like 15 cents a print. When I get the iBook back, I’ll do that as well.

Like so many things, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.

Did I say, save-yourself-the-hassle, back-up-now, lately?