You know that I have a reputation with photographs – that they are decent but everyone has to wait YEARS to see them (case in point, wedding photos still are not up from July 2006). So here’s my funny (but long) story.

My husband and I have recently returned from a three month trip to South America. Everyone keeps asking me to see the photos, and determined not to disappoint, right when I got back from SA I uploaded everything to my father’s computer, organized, deleted, edited the goodies, and starred the ones I would upload. I couldn’t yet do the upload though b/c I needed my own laptop for that job, which was in Colorado. So I backed everything to DVD’s and flew back to CO.

When I got home, I learned that my hard disk was FULL and I would need to move some old photos off to accomplish the job. No prob. I have a network storage device with hundreds of gigs just for the job.

Well, right about the time I went to do the transfer, our network went down. Comcast came out, fixed it. then 2 days later mark broke it again. Comcast came BACK out, fixed it from the modem to the computer, but as soon as you put the router in there, it broke. After 3 weeks of me trying to figure out what was going on, I discovered that the router was broken. New router.

Okay! Intranet/Internet now working, after about 4 weeks. I go to connect to the network storage device, and I can’t see it. Can’t ping it, can do nothing. 2 weeks go by of me communicating with their tech support, they can’t fix it. After pulling my hair out, I come to learn that the new firewall I installed on my computer was blocking the map network drive and ping functions, but only to the network storage device (have other drives mapped no prob). Go figure. So after configuring the firewall, VOILA! Now I get access to the storage device. So I move a whole bunch of files off (takes 2 days, we’re talking lots o’ gigs here). I install the SA photos. Except some of the tags and descriptions I had set with the photos aren’t there (this part took me HOURS AND HOURS when I got back from SA). So I ended up re-creating them. That took me maybe a week.

Okay, tags and descriptions done. On hard drive, done. Now let’s begin the upload! I start to upload. Right when the first set finishes, my computer battery dies. So I plug it in, but no juice is flowing. After about 20 minutes of fiddling with it, I’ve come to discover that the DC jack on my laptop has just died. It’s fused to the motherboard. And battery is fully drained, without a way to juice it. Mark and I operated on the laptop figuring the connectors were lose and we could just re-soder. After 1 agonizing hour of intensive laptop invasive surgery, we discovered this job was for a pro and WAY beyond our skills. That was thurs.

So, right now, I have about 1/20th of my photos online. The rest are stranded on my laptop HD which is sitting besides me, calling my name, but no way to access it. HD enclosure didn’t work. Installing the HD in a new laptop didn’t work. My motherboard is sitting in a repair shop in WA somewhere trying to get fixed. There’s lots more blood and guts to this story, but I’ll spare you the details.

Suffice it to say if you really want to see photos, I can direct you to about 1/20th of them. Let me know if you’re interested.