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life is full of surprises, every day has the potential to be something new. today's little work of wonder? my hard drive deciding to unexpectedly die on me. i've had system failures before, or crashes so bad that i had to rebuilt the disk, but i never had a drive completely die on me before. i mean, it didn't make a sound, won't even spin up when i powered it on. for whatever reason, i wasn't as devastated as i thought i'd be. first off, it was just a 60gb drive. granted, that's still a chunk of data, but compared to my other 300gb+ drives, it was the lesser of many evils. plus, most of the items on that drive were just applications, which can be replaced (although a tremendous pain in the ass). the only bad thing was i lost all my e-mails including addresses, as well as my itunes database and bookmarks.

i had space on another hard drive to install a brand new system. for some strange reason, my IDE PCI controller card decided to work again and i was able to start up from a drive bigger than 130gb for a change. and wouldn't you know it? i had some work today. since most of my data wasn't affected though, it didn't take that long for me to rebound back.

because of my computer problems compounded by the fact i had some work, i wasn't able to go out naturing despite the nice sunny weather. the only time i was able to sneak out for some sunshine was during the system install, when i went out to water the garden.

since my last photo, my sunflowers and cucumber-morning glory fence have grown even bigger. there hasn't been a lot of cucumbers though, and the ones that are still on the vine seem stunted. i don't think i'm going to get anymore cucumbers this season since i haven't seen any new flowers. maybe the morning glories are competing too successfully with the cucumbers.

i made some vodka sauce pasta for dinner (i made a lot, looks like pasta for the rest of the week). still slightly in disbelief that my hard drive would fail, i had it in an external exclosure and kept turning it on and off, hoping somehow i could revive the disk using this form of electronic CPR. to my surprise, i heard the disk spinning, and quickly hooked it up to my laptop. sure enough, it mounted, and i quickly copied off my user folder.