Always Backup!!

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they agree to hold a contest with God as the judge.

They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously for several hours, lines of code streaming up the screen.

Seconds before the end, a bolt of lightning struck taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show what he has come up with.

Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing! I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, “But how?! I lost everything, yet
Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?!”

God chuckles, “Jesus saves.”

This joke came to my mind after lunch today as a vivid reminder of the panic I could have avoided before lunch....Okay, here's the story. I am an aspiring writer. I have several children's books written, along with 19 chapters of my first novel, and about 7 chapters of a young reader novel, a few short stories, and several poems. All of these are saved on a compact little zip drive. I keep this zip drive in a small holder, which clips into a mesh net on the inside of the case I carry my portable DVD player in. The case is with me always, at home and at work. Today at break I went to get my headphones out of my DVD case. I find that it is not zipped up. I also find my zip drive is not clipped to the mesh. Panic insues...I don't even worry about the fact that my DVD player could have fallen out and broken. All I can think of is that I have no back up for most of the stuff on this zip drive. I have paper copies of some of the items, but all that typing...argh!! So I paniced... I sent a text message to my mother-in-law to pleases check around my desk for the zip drive. She was helping out in my daughter's class room, but said she would look when she got home.

So as I waited to hear from her, I was trying to calculate how long it would take to retype all the lost material, and how much this would cut into my actual new writing. I remembered the scene in Little Women where Amy (a young Kristen Dunst) throws Jo's manuscript into the fire. I remembered the anger/agony in Jo (Winona Ryder) as she realized her work was gone. And i realized I was both Amy and Jo in this case...If my work was lost it was only me to blame. As I was eating my lunch, two and a half hours after the initial discovery, I received the message that my zip drive was safe on my desk. My two and a half hours of panic and fear and stress was over.

Oh, yeah, when I got home I made a back up!!

Medication, aging and why I write

When my oldest daughter Dakotah was almost a year old I started having feelings of weakness and shortness of breath. One day when heading to work I started having severe chest pains and thought I better go see a doctor, so I headed in to urgent care. After many hours of poking and podding and wires running to my chest, and being asked numerous times if I was taking cocaine, I was diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure. I was sent immediately to a wonderful cardiologist, who put me on a regimen of heart and blood pressure medication, which seems to be keeping my heart going. The first several years my heart function increased, and then it leveled off. This last check up it had again increased, so the medication must be doing its job.

I guess it is a sign of aging to be on heart medication, I knew it sure made me feel old. And after a couple of years on the medicine I noticed other signs of aging. I was starting to forget things. You know that feeling when you walk into a room and can't remember what you had walked in there for? Well that was happening to me ALL THE TIME. Or I would be at work, putting parts away, I would skip a location because I couldn't find the part in the case I was putting away. When I got to the end of the aisles I'd have the part left, and couldn't remember why I had a part. Then I'd look at the computer and couldn't figure out why it was sending me back. Or at home I would be talking and suddenly couldn't remember the name of that big white box where we put food to keep it cold. Words were disappearing from my mind. I though I had early onset Alzheimer's. I thought I was going crazy.

Then I got online and looked at side effects for my medicines. Buried on a small little website, not listed on most of the websites, under my Coreg was "Short term memory loss". I also looked up ways to fight memory loss. It suggested playing mental games throughout the day. It also said that keeping a journal or writing were good things to keep the mind active and alive. So if people at work see me mouthing things to myself in the aisle, or doodling on a break, or generally looking distracted, I'm probably just playing a mind game, so I don't lose my mind. And my blog here, although new, and the novel I'm writing, and most of my other writings, are just ways to keep my mind going to battle off side effects of a drug I need to keep my heart going strong. So as long as there is a heart beating in this chest of mine, words will be flowing out on my computer, so I'll remember that food goes in a refrigerator.