Well, it finally happened. I killed my computer.
This past Monday my Dell Laptop (Inspiron 8600) started making a clicking sound. I figured it was the fan because it's been acting up lately, until Tuesday morning when it refused to boot up anymore and only gave me an "unmountable boot volume" message accompanied by a terrible sound, like my laptop was going to take flight or something. After a few hours on the phone with a Dell technician, we figured out something must have happened with the cooling fan causing it to malfunction and damage the hard disk. The only real solution was to replace the cooling fan and hard drive and begin anew. They sent a Dell tech out to my house Friday to do the work, and as of this morning, I'm working on a fresh, music-free hard drive.
A friend of mine told me that when a similar thing happened to him it must have been the universe's way of telling him he needed to purge what he had and start over. From an optimist's point of view, maybe that's what's happening here, too. Most of those scholarly papers needed to be rewritten anyways.
Of course, on the other end, I'm faced with the fact that five years worth of photos, music, and grad school work is all but gone save for what I've got stored on Facebook or in folders in the basement. As a music blogger, it's particularly crushing having lost all of my digital music archives, most of which hadn't been copied over to actual CD's.
So if you've been wondering where I've been, well, there's your answer. This isn't the end for Veritas Lux Mea, but perhaps a new beginning. Your support through the past year and a half has been tremendous, and in this time of renewal we look to you our friends even more for your music submissions or recommendations to help us right the ship. Any advice on this starting over process is welcome, and again, thanks for stopping by.
In the meantime, I'll be out buying a back up hard drive so we don't have to do this again.
Gladys Knight - "At Every End There is a Beginning"
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "The Weeping Song"
Division Day - "There is No Telling"
Bishop Allen - "Busted Heart"
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - "Over and Over Again (Lost and Found)"