Last Straw

Well, I feel pretty much as low as I've ever felt. This evening, the dang dog jumped up and pulled my external hard-drive off the table, smashing it. All lost. Every picture I've taken for the last five years was on there. Only a tiny percentage was saved on cd as Justin has always scoffed at my "anal need to double-triple save everything". We had to drag all my files on to it because our computer was overloaded and about to crash...I had just started to double-save things on disks, when we ran out of them and hadn't gotten more yet. I think I average somewhere around 100 shots a day...I do put a half-dozen or so on Flickr daily (thank goodness), but a million other pictures of my kids and my portfolio of professional stuff was recently sorted and moved to the drive due to lack of space on the computer. I threw a box of crackers across the dining room and spent an hour in the bathtub sobbing. I'm sick and tired of EVERYTHING. Calling around, we discovered that there are places that can get the info back, but it is thousands of $. Not possible for us. I am miserable. I make memories through pictures, I can't remember shit unless I have a photo to trigger the memory. My pictures are more important to me than any other thing I own, they aren't a possession, they are part of me, and I feel horrified and defeated to know they are pretty much lost to me now. I mean, taking photos is the only thing that I DO, my only outlet, the one thing that makes me feel like I am anything other than a boring, pointless, little housewife. Each of those shots is precious to me. They ARE me. If it wasn't for my cameras, I sometimes think I would lose my mind. I feel like that terrible nightmare that I always have of my house burning and my pictures being lost has come true. Brokenhearted tonight.