or when life doesn’t go as planned
This has been a weekend of first world problems. Have you ever had a day where everything just seemed to go the opposite of how you needed them to go? One of those days where no matter how hard you tried to make things work, they just . . . didn’t. This was one of those weekends. Try as I might, everything seemed to go topsy-turvy on me.
My weekend project was to finally finish backing up the last of my data from my old hard drives to the cloud in preparation to set up our home data storage server. Thank you for the price hike, Dropbox. As I’m clicking through the last attached hard drive (which has the most recent and most important data of all the old drives), a very sweet dog decides that now is a perfect time to nudge my arm. Suddenly, I see a very important directory being wiped away. Programs cease moving. Time stops. I hold my breath. The hard drive with all the data suddenly throws an error at me: DRIVE INACCESSIBLE. Cue silent scream.
After allowing myself a momentary meltdown, I’ve spent the rest of the weekend trying to recover data from an inadvertent wild click caused by a dog snoot to the elbow. Just twenty years’ worth or so of documents, recipes, email, research, pictures, music, memories. Files that hadn’t been saved to the cloud due to the file storage limit, and because I save practically everything. Seriously, I had a folder called “Floppy Drive Files.” I’m still working on it, but I’m not sure what I’ll end up with.
Then today, in the midst of dog sitting and recovering errant file deletions, the kitchen plumbing decided it was done working. It backed up in a big way, on both sides of our sink. My sweet husband rushed out to get fix-it items in the thunderstorm, because timing is, in fact, everything. He tried a couple things that didn’t work before trying this sulfuric acid concoction that would supposedly eat through whatever was causing this mess. About that time, he noticed that the pipes under the sink were installed in a way that can only be described as Pollockesque as the acidy product used to fix the clog drained out onto our fifty-year-old cabinet wood. By midnight, we have disconnected everything, thrown many towels in the wash, and have a huge fan blowing into the cabinet to dry the soapwateracid flood. Two hours later, we notice that, by the way, the clog in the sink was further in the pluming. The washing machine has now flooded the laundry room and kitchen, and by the time we finished cleaning it up, we used all of our towels. It has been a very long weekend.
In our attempt to have a couple Mondays before Monday can even get here, we came to some interesting realizations in light of our topsy-turvy weekend. We both have a sense of humor and an understanding of life’s bigger picture. We know that none of this is devastating on a life-altering scale, and after initial panic, we are able to laugh about it and move forward. We looked at the little things we may have lost versus what we have.
We have each other. We have a home. We will always have memories of time spent with family and friends, whether the photos are still there or not. We have a dog that loves us enough to want our attention, no matter what else is going on. We live in a town where resources are readily available to us. We are able to go to a hardware store and get supplies to fix sinks that decide to quit working, and can call experienced professionals to fix what we can’t do ourselves. We can learn new ways to do things, and in one case, what not to do.
All in all, nothing happened this weekend that couldn’t be fixed or, at worst, moved on from. Sometimes, little things don’t work out the way you’d like them to. Sometimes, that’s okay. Maybe we need little things to not work out right all the time to put the bigger things in perspective. Also, always keep extra towels.
Fixing Two 