Just call me Little Miss Genius

Tonight was one of THOSE nights. You know the ones, where things just don't go quite as planned.

I got my computer back this week, remember? Wednesday was my appointment at the "Genius Bar" in the Apple Store. The "genius" was able to pinpoint my problems and show ME (yes, me) how to fix them, or at least finagle it to make it work for me. To sum it up, my pictures had been lost when the external hard drive (purchased specifically to store my high-resolution photos so as not to use up all the memory on my laptop) was ejected incorrectly (very easy to do, something I learned the hard way). Basically this meant I had to go back through my hard drive, find all of the photos, and re-import them back into my iPhoto program. Doing so did not mean a perfect fix, however -- the "genius" explained to me that my iPhoto program would not be able to "understand" as well once the photos were put back in because it "remembered" them in their original form and not their new "warped" forms from having been yanked in and out of the program. But, to save my pictures, there really were no other options. Unfortunately this also meant that it would take quite a few hours to re-import these pictures, especially because in the jostling back and forth from my laptop to my hard drive, many duplicates were made, and they all got somewhat out of order, etc., resulting in 20,000+ photos to import back into iPhoto. Not kidding. 20,000+. Originally I had photos dating back to 2006 on this laptop, and I'm guessing I might have had 1,000 or so, not 20,000+, but when you are worried about losing the digital copies of all photos dating back to even before your only beloved child was in the picture, well, I say embrace the 20,000+ photos if it means my 1,000 or so photos are safely sandwiched in there, right? Eventually it is my desire to go through and sort them and get rid of the duplicates (some individual photos have up to probably 20-50 duplicates each). And nope, my iPhoto program cannot simply read them anymore to tell me which are duplicates to get rid of them in one fell swoop. Niiiiiiice.

So, you can imagine how ecstatic I was late Wednesday night upon completion of the big task, getting all of those photos back into the safety of my iPhoto program. Thursday I was already back at it, uploading them to share with family and friends.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Tonight.

My husband was on his way home, running late. I was starving. But I was on the phone telling him some funny story about something my son had said, all the while our crazy three-year-old was bouncing off the kitchen walls around me. Normally I am not one to let my son bounce off the kitchen walls, but I was craving adult interaction at that point, enjoying a good conversation with my beloved, so of course, I wasn't paying as much attention.

It all happened in a split second. My son's leg, poised up in the air in some sort of Kung Fu Panda move, came crashing down on one of the cords connecting my external hard drive to the outlet in the wall, and, you guessed it, pulled it out of the socket. Which, of course, means it once again was ejected incorrectly from my computer. Which, of course, means that BLOOP! THERE WENT MY 20,000+ PICTURES.

Oh, you can probably already imagine the heart-stopping, pulling-my-hair-out, maybe-just maybe-uttering-a-little-"CRAP!"-in-front-of-little-ears-so-please-please-please-forgive-me-and-my-kid-if-you-happen-to-be-around-him-in-the-near-future-and-he-mimics-what-he-heard-his-Mama-say-in-the-heat-of-the-moment unbelievable shock to take over my body.

But folks, I pulled it together. I went and dug out my handwritten scribbled list of instructions I copied from the "genius" telling me how to possibly fix it the first time, and proceeded to attempt it one more time. And lucky, lucky me -- this time I had double the amount to re-import -- 40-freakin'-thousand-plus pictures.

I must interject at this point and tell you I am not a drinking woman. Once or twice a year I will find myself with a glass of white wine in my hand, which usually takes me the whole evening to sip down halfway. So you might chuckle when you find out the first words out of my mouth when my husband came home were:

"I NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED A MARGARITA." (Especially considering I've never ordered a margarita in my life. But dangit if my body wasn't telling me something at that very moment, and that was that I needed one to avoid possible meltdown and to save my hair from a nasty stress-induced-rip-it-all-out-session.)

Now it is 7:15 at least, much later than my stomach is normally accustomed to for dinner (my stomach is smart and knew that food would probably not enter until at least 7:30 or 7:45 if we were just now leaving the house). We climb in the car, speed off to our favorite Mexican food restaurant of choice, only to find the line out the door. My Margarita? It was somewhere in that line out the door.

So, where did our fancy evening out end up? Where did we take my stresses out for a leisurely meal?

Sing with me now...

Five. Five dollar. Five dollar foot-loooo-ooonnnnnnggggg.

Well, I must bid you good-night. Looks like I still have somewhere around 15,000 pictures still to go...