Twenty-four hours?? HA!

I'm mostly back. Mostly. This was a real mess. I was without a 'puter entirely for over a week, and then got it back but without any of the software that I had collected over the years, and then very shortly a CD/DVD drive that quit working again as I tried reinstalling stuff - and so I got to have the OS re-reinstalled and start over. And then the drive quit working again. We finally decided it was one particular install disk that it didn't like, and as long as I keep that disk in another room where the 'puter doesn't have to even look at it, we're okay.

So here is what I lost:

• All my software. And in reloading things I'm finding that most of my versions were so old, I can't even reinstall and will have to upgrade.
• All my bookmarks. Ugh.
  
• All my old email. That includes folders and folders and folders of family and friend history. I thought it would be backed up but it is not.
• All my old email ADDRESSES. That probably means YOUR email address, too. I may never get back in touch with all those people now. This really breaks my heart. Please, I'm begging you, if you are reading this, please drop me a line so I'll have your address back.
• All my bookmarks. All of them. I have years and years of bookmarks that are gone.
  
• All my saved passwords. All my financial website passwords are nuked; my eBay userIDs that I don't use very often; my various email addys which I couldn't check even by webmail from my work 'puter because I did not have the passwords.
• There is also some stuff that I hope is still on the backup server, like all the family photos I still had on my hard drive and a couple thousand fonts I had bought a couple of years ago, but hopefully they can be recovered.
  

I still have some software to reinstall, like iTunes; I'm back to a really old version of Photoshop, and I'll have to buy Microsoft Office again. I also can't use my old Quickbooks anymore and am waiting on Quickbooks Pro to arrive so I can do a restore on my data.

It could be much worse, and I sure hope I have learned my lesson not to be quite so dependent upon a computer. (Probably not.)

One good thing is that I found a deal on Quickbooks Pro: Amazon has it on sale right now for about $160 with free shipping, and then if you apply coupon code BYAPSEGV, you get another twenty bucks off. It retails for $200, so that's really good. I'm thinking of upgrading the church's Quicken (even older than my Quickbooks) with this one.