I almost lost a loved one - my computer!
When I was in college I had a roommate who claimed to, among other things, see ghosts and be slightly clarivoyant. Not enough to blatantly be able to predict the future or anything, but enough that she'd had strange dreams or visions about things that ended up happening. She claimed that whenever a loved one died, she had dreams about teeth before hand, like within the day before. I don't know why I remember this, I just always have.
Last week, I had a dream that a dentist was pulling my teeth... like 5 or 6, all in the back, one by one. I awoke remembering what that roommate claimed and it kinda creeped me out, but I ignored it. Last night I had an even weirder dream, where I was working as like an assistant at some kind of low income/homeless dental clinic and a girl came in (don't ask me why, but it was totally that girl who played Zoey Bartlett on The West Wing) and she was getting a lot of her teeth pulled, but she also had some WEIRD fucking ailment where one of her arms and one of her legs was rotting... but, not rotting like flesh rots but a combination of that and almost wilting like a flower, so it was not as gorey as it sounds. She didnt' think anything was wrong, didn't hurt, and could move them and use the fingers and toed, and while in the chair was talking about her father, and me and another girl helping out realized she didn't know her father was dead, and as we convinced her that her father had died, she stopped being able to use the fingers and move them and they wilted faster (like almost time-lapse camera shot sped to real time) and we realized they were her father's limbs that she'd sewn on to her own stubs (she'd had an accident and lost her arm & leg years before, or it was a birth defect or something, nothing crazy like she'd chopped hers off or anything) and that's why the limbs were bad. But she'd been able to use them because she truly didn't believe her dad had died and truly believed they were her limbs. Severe mind over matter.
I blame the Pink vodka I had at the club last night that was infused with caffeine and guarana for such a weird dream. But, the limbs thing was weird but didn't really jostle me... it was that I had ANOTHER dream about teeth being pulled. Now, at this point, all my grandparents are dead and Dominic's grandmothers aren't really that close, i.e. no real health problems other than your average "getting old" stuff. So I remembered I have The Illustrated Dream Dictionary, and I looked up teeth. No entry. The closest thing I could find was that if you had a dream where your mouth was wide open, it might be a sign to shut it more often and listen to people. And the limbs thing didn't help either; there was nothing about false limbs or limbs not working or rotting or anything. I looked it up online and all I found was this: "Teeth: Normally an unfavorable sign in a dream. It signifies displeasure and also shows that you are afraid of loosing someone dear to you." Not quite the "someone will die" type of omen my former roommate seemed to believe it was, but still unsettling.
And then when I got up and went to start my computer... one of my worst nightmares happened. It froze at the motherboard screen and wasn't loading anything. I tried resetting, restarting, getting into the BIOS, nothing worked. It was working fine last night when I checked my email before going to bed after returning from the club. I turned it off and proceeded to watch Damian play Zelda for awhile before trying again. Nothing. I finally had to ask Dominic for help.
He did the same things I did, then unhooked stuff, pulled the tower out and used a vacuum and canned air to dust out everything. He checked the connections inside to make sure the motherboard was hooked up to everything right. Nothing looked obviously jostled (no "A-ha! There's the problem" type moment). At that point I was practically praying to the God I don't believe in...convinced that I was thoroughly fucked, and that, not only would I have to be spending money I didn't have on a new computer, or new parts, but the fear that I may have lost thousands of pictures, all of my work files since my personal and professional computer is one in the same now, and hundreds of fonts, design files, etc.
Luckily, after the dusting out and checking connections, it started up fine. Of course that's sent me into a massive fury of backing everything up - just in case. Something that I REALLY ought to do more often. Despite having a DVD burning drive, I didn't actually have any software that would allow me to burn a data DVD, taking advantage of those 4.7 gb of storage per disc instead of 712 mb on a CD. So I found a freebie software called DeepBurner that's actually working really well. There's a pro version too, but this free version has all the features I need for now, so needless to say the burning of 10 DVDs of data is on my agenda tonight. They take about 20-30 minutes each to burn, which isn't terrible. I've previously been keeping my backup CDs in my big general CD file cabinet that has my other software stuff, games, etc. but I think tomorrow I'm going to head to an office supply store or the dollar store and see what kind of small CD case I can get and just keep them all in a separate, secure location that's easy to find. Maybe now I'll be a good girl about backing my shit up. I'm also looking into online backup stuff. I'm beta testing a product that allows me to securely back up my files to their servers (review will come soon at TrishaLyn.com once I've tested it more a bit) so I'm using that right now, and I'm also contemplating signing up for Jungle Disk. It's $2/month fee plus 15 cents per GB that you store and 10 cents per GB you upload. So, it would be about $27.25 for me to get started (this beta program says I'm backing up 101 GB of data since I set the backup really broad) and then about $17.15 per month to maintain it, maybe a bit more if I upload a substantial amount of information.
Here's what I don't get about Jungle Disk. It's "brought to you" by Amazon and Rackspace. There are different options for cloud backup. If I choose Amazon S3 US, then the prices I just mention apply. But if I choose Rackspace Cloud Files, there's no transfer fees, so it would just be the $17.15/month period. So, I'm hoping that someone out there that reads this has some experience with Jungle Disk and can explain to me which is a better option. In terms of security they look the same, just different pricing. And I know that, generally speaking, both Amazon and Rackspace are trusted names and brands so that doesn't really factor in. I'm just glad I didn't lose my computer to the gods and, now that I'm using Toodledo to keep my to-dos and stuff straight, I'm definitely adding a reminder to back everything up once per quarter!
