After long absence ...

... it feels good to get back here to Natures. And to discover that, in spite of the lack of posting for the last month, March had the third highest traffic of any month since I began writing here back in 2005. Thanks to all who checked in. I guess there's plenty to read if you poke around.

It's embarrassing to tell all and sundry why I've been gone for so long. Talk about the cobbler's children who run barefoot! Back in mid March I had the very unhappy experience of having two of my desktop system's hard drives fail on the same day. One of the drives contained all my writing (it was home to Windows' "My Documents" folder), as well as many gigabytes of downloaded music, myriad photographs, etc., and the other contained, among other things, all my email. And, of course, it had been much much too long since I'd backed everything up. Most of the music, in fact, I had never backed up at all. So I've been rebuilding, recovering, reconstructing, and re-downloading for weeks. At this point I'm pretty sure I've actually recovered all the writing from various archives, CDs, and flashdrives, and I'm working on the email. Much of the music is still available via the Live Music Archive and bittorent sites like Lossless Legs - though, of course, it'll take many hours to find and download it. And some ... well, some is lost.

When I finish rebuilding the system, it'll have dual SATA drives mirrored via BIOS-level RAID 1, so perhaps I won't have to face this particular issue again anytime soon. That would be nice. In the meantime, I'm working on my trusty notebook, formerly used mostly for recording, and backing all data up to an external 1.5 T USB drive every day. And keeping my fingers crossed. If all continues to go well, I should be able to resume posting on my usual sporadic schedule.