This blog post is totally off-topic, I think — well, given the Endless Winter, maybe not totally off-topic — but I feel the need to vent my frustration and so I am giving space to it.

For years I used to carry around little spiral-bound notebooks, journalling on the train, on a plane, up in my mother’s room when I went to visit my dad and brother after she died, wherever…until communing with a laptop became more expedient. Not to mention that I once left a notebook in the ladies room of the Chicago Theatre the first time I went to see Steely Dan and I never recovered it. I imagine it was simply thrown in the trash, but for quite a while I got slightly paranoid and thought somehow someone had stolen the notebook or would find it and manage to trace it to me, even though my name wasn’t on it. A lot of the early bird-and-music observations are buried somewhere in much earlier notebooks such as the ones pictured above, and someday I have to go through and decipher them, my handwriting not always being legible even to me, since I have always thought faster than I can write, and it still happens to me even as I type at the speed of 120 wpm.

But now that everything is supposedly secure with my new laptop, it’s only fitting that I find a new cause for paranoia. Somewhere in the last day or two, I think it might have been yesterday morning, I saved and closed everything and let Apple install the latest security update, which I had read about, I think, in the New York Times the day before, and it didn’t seem like an issue I had time to deal with, as far as backing up All My Data before, since I have never, ever lost a text document…

Drivel is sometimes my only verification of existence, especially when the Crows aren’t around. I don’t take it personally with the Crows, they’ll be back as soon as the weather improves.

Well, suffice it to say that I am glad I didn’t lose any of my work I was doing with the photographs, although I do have the original photos backed up externally – but I lost the entire month of drivel for February 2014, whatever it was, basically stuff that I wrote on the weekends, sometimes a comment here and there during the week, nothing terribly important, I don’t think – except that now I will never know.

I guess I’ve been lucky. Just dumb luck. Read about this happening to people all the time, right? The stupid file was saved! I didn’t lose December or January. What happened to February? I lost a month of my life. Not the first time it’s happened (having had an entire laptop stolen) and likely not the last either.

Where the paranoia sets in? Maybe I’m being spied on by the NSA and it’s incorporated into the Mac update. Wouldn’t surprise me. Not that I’m doing anything any more subversive than anybody else. I may have signed a few extra petitions and letters urging people to drop the Keystone XL… but that’s another off-topic blog post let’s hope not in the making.

I am still fried over this lost file, but I will never ever recover it – I’ve been everywhere on the Mac and it does not exist, and yes, I downloaded some free software to look for it which doesn’t help either – it simply got swept up during the installation or restart or whatever it was that went on yesterday or the day before or the night before or whenever it was that I allowed this to happen. Maybe it was last night when I was just too tired to do anything? No, I was falling asleep reading something. It wasn’t last night. Just as well I didn’t notice it last night, it would have pissed me off even more and I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. I am simply going to start saving these damned things on a flash drive. It’s easier and I can always overwrite with the latest version. Period.

Thanks for listening to my rant. I’ll be back soon with an update on the baby birds.

P.S. Arggh!! As I am now restoring the last version of this post…

Well I’d be really annoyed if any of my picture work disappeared along with it so I guess I can live with this small sacrifice. Offering up journals to the software gods. Really.