crap.

Ever have something happen that is so completely horrible that you can’t even talk about it?  You procrastinate telling anyone about it or doing anything about it, but it sits in the back of your mind and stomach like a hot coal… with pointy spikes on it.

When we moved to Brasil, we bought a small external hard drive to put all our pictures on so they wouldn’t fill up our laptops.  Then, just kept putting our pictures on it. Baby pictures, family pictures, everything from our dating life and beyond.

Last week, after I loaded all of my pictures from the sibling reunion in LA, the hard drive made a horrible sound and froze.  Turns out, if we even try to start it up again, everything will be lost.  The only way to save the data is to send it off to a “clean room” and pray they can manually extract the files.  For a few hundred dollars.  Seven of them.

So there’s the *ouch - that price tag HURTS* - and the *I am seconds away from losing my first pictures of WT, our first house, our honeymoon, the people who saved my life in Brasil, my daughter and my grandmother together, WT’s first swimming lesson… everything…*

The hard drive is sitting in our fridge.  I’m sitting in my closet.  Holy CRAP this hurts.