Scene of the Crime

This is where it happened. Except it was night. Past eleven and dark surrounded the island of light on the porch where Ed sat smoking and gaming on his laptop. It was the first time in over a week he had got home with enough time and energy left to get on the computer after work. He was in in the best mood he'd been in days.

Then from beyond the back fence from over by the park pool a kid kicked his ball into the backyard. Not a young kid but high teens to mid twenties. He called out to Ed asking him to get his ball and Ed obliged, coming down off the porch and crossing the front yard, opening the gate getting the ball and sending it back over the fence. Ed says he was gone no more than thirty seconds. But that was all the time the perp needed to mount the porch steps, unplug the laptop from its cord and disappear down the unlit lane in front of the trailer.

We're sure the two worked as a team. Using Ed's obliging generosity against him.

So now, after being spoiled by us each having our own laptop for nearly two years we are back to sharing. With NaNo starting in ten days!!! It will be several weeks, probably after Thanksgiving, before he can even think about replacing it and of course that means other things get pushed back down the priority list.

Ed is heartbroken and I feel his pain. Have imagined it happening to me vividly enough to seem almost real which is why I would never walk away from mine for even five seconds when I took it out there and why I was always teethgrittingly irritated with him when he did it with his (once even leaving it out there while he ate dinner inside) and beyond irritated when he used to leave my laptop out there back when he was using it regularly.

He didn't have anything irreplaceable on his machine. Unlike me with my two dozen plus stories in progress and dozens of poems, years of journals, hundreds of photos--thousands including the family photo scan project--hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes intricately interlinked. Of course some portion of that stuff is still on the laptop drive but I have ten months worth of new stuff and edits etc that exist only on my netbook--unless they were posted here or saved to a thumb which I did a few times with a few files.

Yes it is way past time to back up my files. I am still such a procrastinator at that task. I had better take this as a wakeup call to get on that pronto. Wish I still had the mental wherewithal to tackle it now as I've given Ed permission to install his game on here when he wakes up and to use it until I'm awake enough to want it back for something more than glancing at my email. He swears that installing and running the game will not put my netbook at risk of a crash and I've forbidden him to take it out on the porch.

I'm trying to reassure myself that that is good enough, that nothing will happen to my files before I'm awake enough to deal with the hours of file transfers involved in backing up my content. Last time it took 4 hours just to back up my graphics files and since then I've put in dozens more hours of scanning and who knows how many pics off my camera. Then there are ebooks and podcasts and music and audio books and programs.....

I guess it has to be good enough. Even if I can't relax about it I have to sleep. I've been awake for 20 hours so any attempt to do backups now would be as much if not more of a danger to my files than Ed running his game on here. That risk is probably more my imagination running amok than anything real so as long as he takes my injunction against taking it out on the porch to heart...