Grateful for the Little Things

I have occasionally wondered after watching a news broadcast about the survivors of Hurricane Katrina or more recently Hurricane Ike, what I would take with me if I had to evacuate at a moments notice. Now I know....my external hard drive. Thanks to the age of digital photography, we don't print out a lot of pictures these days...something that I am now determined to remedy. It was not until today that I realised just how much I treasure those little snapshots.
I had a computer that had all our photos on it...and you guessed it...it died. So I went to the repair shop that had repaired it before and saved all the data for me and asked him to do it again. No problem! On Friday it was ready but I didn't get a chance to hook it up until today. When I turned it on...to my horror..the hard drive had been completely erased. I was beside myself with panic. I rang the repair shop and the guy who answered the phone said that all the recovered files should be there on my desktop and if they weren't ...whoops...sorry! AAARRRGGGGHHHH. I thought I had lost every digital picture and video we had ever taken. I just wanted to cry. Then I remembered our external hard drive. I knew I had made some backups but I wasn't sure how much I had saved. After spending the last hour scanning through all the backed up files it looks like I had saved most of our pictures and videos. Phew!!! Unfortunately everything else is gone from word docs to tax files but I have to be grateful that we still have all our photos.
As I was searching through the files I came across this one taken when Jack was one. Please excuse the poor video technique but I am so excited that I still have this that i had to share it.