Instant Karma's Gonna get You...

And my, how it does! John Lennon was a wise man, indeed. I must've done something really bad recently, because karma got me in the worst way...unexpectedly and out of nowhere. Wednesday night I was cleaning out my My Pictures folder, as I do occasionally. I separate the pics into different sub folders and then copy them onto CD-R disks. Then after I check to make sure they were written to the disks, I erase them off the hard drive. I've been storing my pictures this way for about two years. The last time I did this was in May, and all was well. So Wednesday night, I got Patrick's pictures done, then the ones of the family and both the boys together, then I pulled out Ben's disk. Only this time, when I saved the newest folder, it for some insane, unheard of, unbeknownst-to-man reason wiped out all the previous folders. Gone. All my pictures of Ben. His whole life. Needless to say, I freaked. It has taken me until now to be able to think about it without crying a little bit...for two reasons. The first is that I called my computer whiz friend Chris, who owns his own computer-ish business here in town, and he had me bring in the offending disk and my hard drive first thing in the morning. After extensive discussion about what went down, he assured me that I did not make some bonehead mistake, that you are not supposed to be able to delete off a CD-R even if you wanted to, and that this seemed like one of those freakishly unfortunate things that sometimes happens with computers. He also advised me to store all my pictures ever on both a disk and my hard drive, so if this happened again, they'd at least be in two places. Then he kindly installed a second hard drive for storage that he said would hold 10,000 pictures without breaking a sweat. Thank God, otherwise I would be sweating every time I copied a disk from now on. The second reason I feel better is because I was very proactive about taking inventory of my old photos. I went upstairs and dragged out the actual prints that I occasionally get at Walmart, and there were quite a few in there. Then I looked through all my old files of Patrick and Ben together, which were cataloged differently, and there were plenty of those. And finally, I went through my blog post by post and downloaded all the ones that I had previously uploaded, which was no easy task since I live in the sticks and have to deal with dial-up. But it was worth it because I got about 90 photos back, ones that were obviously favorites or I never would've posted them in the first place. To be truthful, some were lost...but that's life, I suppose. It could've been a lot worse.

I'm not sure why I'm even rattling all this off...a form of therapy, maybe? At any rate, in an effort to make sure Ben doesn't feel unloved later in life, I'm trying to take a few more pics of him now. Here's one I snapped today:

He's just chillin' with the Braves here. Ben is now a die-hard sports junkie, to the point where he gets mad if you turn on cartoons and whatnot. He wants to watch ESPN. His favorites are baseball ("ball-ball"), football ("ball-ball") and I'm thinking he will love basketball ("ball-ball") when it starts up again this fall. Katie, I'm not quite sure how he feels about tennis yet, but I have a feeling that you and he might soon have a date on the couch rooting for Nadal or Roddick or whoever...

Anyway, Luke is eating it up. He gets to check out the game and spend quality time with his sons. Whatever. Hey I'm happy too...they're all out of my hair when ball-ball's on.