Serves me right

Well, the snow came so that was good.  At least now we feel part of the general breakdown of the system ... obviously the ploughs and gritters haven't been through the village and yesterday the weekly rubbish collection which we all religiously put out was still there at the end of the day and there was no hate mail post either.

Having stamped round in the snow a bit, checked that the birds had food and other various snowy jobs, by the afternoon the excitement had worn off, so I decided to tackle my Mac.  Mid August as we were in the process of moving and when I needed access to important emails, my .mac account just disappeared.  One minute it was there and the next - gone.  I twiddled around a bit, but with about a week to go before moving out I didn't have the time to waste trying to sort out the problem, so moved everything to my gmail account and just hoped that all the important paperwork I needed ended up there.

Yesterday in a moment of rare stupidity genius, I thought that if I put in the install disc and reinstalled the system, saving all the other stuff, I would eventually find my .mac account again.  Press all the right buttons, the Mac whirs away and bingo ... nothing.  Everything had gone.  Totally everything.  The Mac has been completely lobotomised.  Oh yes, I have my mac email page back but all mails are through gmail but four years of work have disappeared totally, utterly and completely.  And more importantly, four years of photos.  Gutted.  I am just hoping that somewhere inside my machine they are tucked away and that some brilliant person will be able to find them for me.  The police seize computers and manage to extract information from them, so I am sure someone, somewhere will be able to rescue my 3500 photos ... at what price?  But that will have to wait until 2011.  Apart from that, there is a load of design/artwork that took me hours that has also disappeared in a puff of smoke, and tons of other stuff which I can't remember but will when I need it.

And after all that messing around, any mail sent on my .mac address just gets thrown back in my face - I don't exist, address not recognised, error 20009987333, whatever ... so until the snow melts perhaps I will go to the geeky Apple site and see if there is help to be had.

Stupidly courageously got the car out last night to drive to the pub as I had run out of cigarettes it's the only place where you get a mobile 'phone signal and catch up on the days excitement - who had/hadn't been to work, who had crashed their car, whose heating had broken down, usual sort of stuff.  Funny how 4WD cars are regarded kindly when the weather is rough!  Although down here at least half of the cars are 4WD, so no-one is rude about mine!  I was slightly nervous as the roads through the village are in fact lanes with passing places and stone walls on either side seem to be de rigeur - not ideal on snowy, compacted driving surfaces.  However the motor behaved well and we got there and back without transforming it into a Mini.  GW has to go to town today as he has run out of heart pills (quite an important thing to have around when you need them) so we will see if we get there and back without transforming the car!