Ouch

Man, I've been terrible at updating this week. All my tens of readers must just be so mad at me. But it has been quite busy. Having a guest over all week, plus I seemed to have had a pretty full social schedule while at the same time adapting to being a working woman again and waking up at 6:30am every morning has kind of knocked me on my ass.

This weekend I went camping with a bunch of people I didn't really know. It was so much fun. I got invited to go along by a friend of a friend and I knew about 4 people out of the 17 campers. But all the people involved were great fun and just super nice people. It was such a cool weekend, and very well organized! For meals we were divided up into teams and each group had to prepare all the food for one meal for the entire group. My group (team SMAK - an acronym of our names), kicked ass with our delicious preparation of chili (veggie & meat), garlic toast and topped the brilliance off with a group dance routine involving belly dancing and Napoleon Dynamite-like running. The weekend also included one day full of rain that lead to a construction of a mind-blowing tarp village, lots of swimming in the rain with multiple frisbees being thrown in all directions, and the marriage of two of best things ever: marshmallows and bacon. Mariza, you are a culinary genius. I am home now, exhausted, sore, smelling like smoke (even after a shower) and very happy I had such a great weekend.

The weekend was a nice distraction from something that has been plaguing my thoughts for a while now. I lost my Africa photos & videos. Well, most of them. About a month ago I bought an external hard drive because my laptop was getting full and very slow so I put a ton of my stuff (including all the Africa stuff) onto the hard drive. I know I should have backed it up on to a cd too, but I didn't have the time initially, or the money to buy all the cds that it would have taken. I know I was stupid. I know. So 2 days before I wrote my GMAT exam I was trying to see something on the external hard drive and it wouldn't let me access it. And it was saying the drive was corrupted. And my heart was starting to race and I wanted to cry so I turned it off and put it away and tried not to think about the potential consequences of my external hard drive being broken and I tried to concentrate on the GMAT studying. Once that was done I tried to get the drive fixed. That didn't work. Then I tried to get them to recover anything they could. They couldn't. Then I got my good friend Matt to try to "undelete" the photos that were on my computer (when you delete something from your computer they are still there, they are only erased for ever once you save something over them). So Matt was thankfully able to retrieve about 400 photos for me and some videos even. I am so happy about that but sad that I am such an idiot and lost so much that meant so much to me. It hurts to write about this because it makes me so sad and I feel I am such an idiot.

But the good news is that I have those 400 or so from Matt plus the photos already on flickr and I will email all my Kenya friends (and friends from my trip through Namibia/Botswana etc) who I gave photos to and hopefully will be able to retrieve more that way. So I might be able to get back about 1/3 of the photos (I originally had over 3000). Anyway, I know I sound like I am complaining about nothing but the photos and videos meant a lot to me (even the stupid ones that I would never have printed out or shown other people, just because they captured a small part of my time in Africa and every second of that time was so special to me that I feel by losing the photos, I may have lost a memory of a moment of that time and that just really kills me.

But if I learned anything from my time in Africa it is not to let things stress you out. If I look a this in perspective, it is not a big deal. Hakuna shida (no problem). Life is still pretty good.