The Good & the Ugly!!!

Well a quick brag moment & the good of my weekend!! I have the best husband ever!! He sure is a hard worker & let me remind you he had knee surgery just about 2 months ago & I know he is still in quite a bit of pain! He worked all afternoon & into the night on Saturday putting up these awesome storage shelves in our garage to let me store some of my "wedding stuff" where it is easy to get to.... that of course is after waking up at 4am to take 17+ youth & Garrett's 1st time to do Baptisms at the Vernal Temple. So not only was he already tired - but he worked so hard! Then he helped me organize my stuff & then helped clean up the house & catch up on dishes as I had been working terribly hard to organize our remaining boxes & clean up the basement so we could use it (but mostly looking for my mother's day gifts I had purchased ahead of time & couldn't find!) He did so much to help me out & I appreciate it! I love the new shelves too & I know he loves having my stuff out of the way!!
Well then I was woke up bright & early about 6:20a.m. to breakfast in bed on Mother's day... then he took care of lunch for everyone too!! I was so spoiled & got to rest on Mother's day!! I sure did appreciate it!!

Now to the UGLY (& mostly nerdy part, but something I love doing... but enjoy it more when it has a happy ending).... during our last week of packing, we were right down to the bare essentials - long story short - my External 320GB MEGA (for me) Hard drive that I save everything to got bumped (on accident by a younger member of the family) & it fell about 1 foot off of the computer onto the HARD table.... well to say the least my heart sank as I looked through my back-up disks only to realize that the last time I backed up my data was October 2006. Which is wonderful that I had backed it up at all... but to my horror - all of my genealogy research, last 12 months of journal entries, Family Photos & photos I have taken for others during 2007, all my data that I use over & over for Cub Scouts & Girls camp is stuck in the little silver/black box & I can't recover it!! It is still in there - just not accessible. I have torn the darn thing apart - put it in my other computer as a slave drive & it isn't recognizing it... so my last ditch effort as counseled by several professionals was to place it in the freezer overnight & try again as it could possibly help the metal to expand & to read the disk surfaces... but for only a short amount of time so I had to just save the most important data as quickly as possible.... well that didn't work either & in short almost blew up my whole computer - which thank-goodness it just shorted out & I was able to reset it & get it started again.... So I am happy I didn't loose everything, but so sad to have lost all of this!!!
I have been looking into having a specialist recover the data - but it runs anywhere from $700 - $1500.... which is ridiculous!! I have debated on buying another drive between $50 - $80 - tearing them both apart so I could get my little disks/spools out & place them in a new drive - just to recover the data & be done... but to my luck & being my first time getting right down to the very sensitive stuff... I would scratch or chip it & then it would all be lost forever!!! I really enjoy tinkering & doing these types of things & learning... just not when the outcome is a possible unhappy ending!
I think I am going to just have to put the little silver box in my hope chest & hope that someday I can recover at least the pictures??? Who knows!! I am so sad - I really do want to cry! I guess I am going to just have to get over it now that I have vented & try to be positive & look at it as a new - fresh start!!! Ugh!! Life! (Anyone who has copies of any of the pictures I have taken this past year - please save me a copy!!! Pictures of my kids, Family Reunions, etc.)