So...there was a lot of crackling off in our Sanctuary. Richard and I were excited. What kind of birds were back there, nesting and raising their babies? Maybe it was the rare flying squirrels, or perhaps some owls? Ricahrd went back there with a camera to catch whatever he could.

He heard a crashing noise, looked up and two birds were locked together falling through the trees...

BUZZARDS.

BUZZARDS. Mating and nesting in our Sanctuary. We don't know where the nests are. They're not visible in our leafless trees. Maybe they don't make any. At any rate, we've never even seen a baby buzzard. So while all the country neighbors have the cool animals, we have BUZZARDS.

It could only happen to city-slickers.

Six days ago...

Tuesday, April 1, 2008...It wasn't an April Fool's Day joke.

The lightning storm caused a strike right in front of our house. We had turned off all the computers, but not unplugged them from the surge protectors. Richard has a fancy, battery operated surge protector...I have an expensive one, but no battery. The resulting EMP (electromagnetic pulse) from the strike fried my computer. We took it in to salvage the harddrive, thinking only the motherboard or the power supply was damaged. According to the tech, this is only the second time he's seen a harddrive so badly damaged he couldn't retrieve all the data. He did a couple sweeps and collected some, but my books were gone.

Needless to say, I was crushed. Not only had I lost my books, I lost YEARS of photos and other documents.

Richard was certain he'd done a backup of my system in the last month or so. We'd moved from the Airstream to the house, so stuff that was hurriedly packed was scattered between garage and house. We had no idea where the backup drive could be.

We bought a new computer and began the task of learning the new Vista program, plus downloading things I use like Yahoo Messenger (which took 3 days, due to disconnects and extremely slow dialup - 24 baud at times!). We also bought an external harddrive, in hopes of salvaging my data. That didn't work on Richard's computer. We may try it on mine, later, but chances are slim.

I found the backup drive this morning. Richard loaded it to the new computer...and the only thing I've lost is about 150 pages of two books (anything written after Feb 15, the date of the backup) and the last six weeks of photos!

Needless to say, despite the loss of my last 6 weeks of work, I'm still ecstatic - most of the precious photos were saved.

I'm happy.