I Wanted To Say Cuss Words

Remember how I was telling you about how much I was working on all of those photos of Chickster? And how I was painfully weeding through over 600 to choose and edit my favorites? Well, I finally got down to about 55 pictures, including the ones I changed to black and white, edited the color and lighting on, and had some fun with.

So, being my organized little self, I was going to get them all renamed and in somewhat of a cohesive order, grouped with the same outfits, etc. Last night, I opened up my handy dandy little Microsoft Picture Manager to do just that.

And found out it is of the devil.

I've used it many times before to rename photos and have never had problems. It will even put sequential numbers on all the pictures so they stay in the order you want them in. It's been great.

But last night it was demon posessed. It ate 10 of my photos. Select All, Rename with new file names, select Ok. Done. Only I realized that some photos seemed to then be missing.

So calmly, I decided that surely there must be a glitch somewhere and they just landed in a temporary time warp. So I refreshed. Nothing. I then thought maybe they'd gotten deleted accidentally. Not in the recycle bin.

That's when I called Husband in. I told him what happened. Surely with all of his computer prowess, he could find them. Nope. He searched my entire hard drive and couldn't find them. We searched message boards online, and apparently no one has had this problem since 2003. Or at least they haven't posted it on a help message board.

I was heartbroken.

Photos 10 - 20 are missing. Nowhere to be found. Lost in outer space. These were ten of the best of the best. The cream of the crop. Gone. Do you understand? G.O.N.E.

One of those pictures (my third favorite) was so perfect that when I opened it to edit a few things, I couldn't even bring myself to do it. It was perfect just the way it was. Gone.

I went through the stages of grief. I wanted to say cuss words. Then I wanted to throw my stupid computer against the wall. Then I wanted to call Bill Gates at home all snug in his bed and tell him to get somebody, anybody, to figure out where the pictures of my sweet baby boy went. Then I wanted to cry. Then I just wanted to throw up.

I did none of those things. I called it a night and went to bed.

So my only hope is that a recovery software I'm going to get from a friend will be able to find my photos.

Husband reminds me constantly (1) to remember to copy my pictures to the network drive before doing anything to them from now on, and (2) I took those pictures myself, so I can obviously take more.

But I don't want more. I want those.

So thanks, Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I hope you enjoy those ten pictures. Because you won't be getting any more from me.