Technology...

(Brooklyn playing on Ella's Leapster)

we have a love-hate relationship right now. Actually, it started about six months ago when I discovered my external hard drive no longer worked. No problem, I thought, it's still under warranty. Yep, it was, but in order to fix it the company was going to have to wipe it clean... meaning everything I had already saved on there was going to be trashed. My only option, they said? DriveSavers.

DriveSavers!? They sound like knights in shining armor, don't they, but they're actually bank robbers. Guess how much they were going to charge me to save the information on my broken external hard drive? $1850. "Are you kidding me?" I said to the guy on the other end. "Ya, that's not going to happen."

"What do you have on there?" he asked.

"Ummm, just about every picture I've taken since 2004, including every picture I've ever taken of my children since birth; all of our trips across Europe, Vietnam, Canada, Puerto Rico; every place we've lived; every holiday... basically every significant moment in my life since 2004, not to mention about a hundred Word files."

"Well, we have the jpeg only price, which is $855."

"I'll get back to you, I said."

I was very upset after talking to the bank robbers, but after six months of stewing and even more irritation with my maxed-out computer, (which I discovered was deleting old pictures to make enough room for the new ones I was uploading) I decided I needed to suck it up and get the dumb external hard drive fixed.

So, last night, I stayed up until 1:30 am transferring data from my computer hard drive onto my new and improved external hard drive, which also has all of my old pictures on it again... $855 worth of old pictures. Uhhhh, technology.