Lost things

I hate looking for lost things.  My kids (and often my husband) are constantly asking me to find their stuff.  It drives me nuts.

I saw Roseanne Barr on The Tonight Show during her very first appearance with Carson.  I must have been in my late teens, I guess.  One bit has stuck with me all these years. "My family is always asking me to find things for them.  Like the uterus is a tracking device."  Funny, but true.  The uterus IS a tracking device.  That's why men can't ever find anything.

The lost things on my mind this morning are pictures and videos from my daughter's early childhood.  I can't find the files I thought I had pulled off my husband's old laptop.  I KNOW I took the laptop to our computer guy last year, and I KNOW I gave him the external harddrive to put them on.  But they aren't there.  And I can't find the old laptop, either, to have the files pulled off of it again. 

It's eating me up inside--where are the files?  Mark wants a video of Sophie when she was about 3 years old, telling the story of "The Three Little Pigs."  I can see her perfectly in my minds eye....She's wearing a Disney Princesses nightgown in blue.  She has a pixie haircut and a teeny button nose and huge blue eyes.   For the big bad wolf she says, "And I'll puff! and I'll puff!" instead of "huff" then "puff."  But I can't find the darn file.

I've looked everywhere for the old laptop. It hit me yesterday, with a sickening thud, that I think I had our computer guy destroy the harddrive after he pulled the files.  The laptop was useless, and we didn't need it back, and I didn't need the harddrive because he pulled the files off. 

And then, of course, I have MY harddrive that I sent to a Chicago firm that was supposed to get the files off that drive (which is dead as a doornail, and also encrypted) because there are three years of pictures I mostly don't have anywhere else.  I have all our Christmases on Snapfish, and a lot of special events on Facebook.  But there are thousands of pictures (and all our videos) that I'm probably never going to see again.  Because the Chicago firm can't figure out the drive (even though I already paid them a $300 non-refundable "parts fee").  I may try again with a local company, but I don't have high hopes.

I haven't told Mark yet about his old laptop files. He's going to be really upset if the files are gone (not mad at me, but upset that they are lost--he's a very sentimental person and doesn't do well with losing sentimental things).  I need to check with the computer company (our guy doesn't work there anymore, but hopefully they will have some kind of record of exactly what they did for me), but I'm not hopeful I'm going to get any good news.

Add that on top of the disappointment of losing my Dad's house to foreclosure, which we'd planned on but it still sucks, and battling my cousin for the $500 he still owes for the last two months of utilities he lived in my Dad's house (he's just completely ignoring my repeated text messages, which is disappointing and frustrating as hell, because I am NOT paying his $500 utility bill). And it's a lot of poo poo on my parade.

No matter how hard I try, I can't get the disappointing black cloud that's hanging over my head from these nagging issues to dissapate.  I really want to just let them all go, and move on, but I keep replaying in my head what I did wrong, and "if only" I'd done things differently, I wouldn't be going through this right now. 

I read Jen's post this morning, and I'm going to try to put my mind on this statement: "the people who are always abusing themselves for the things they should have done seem to use it as a substitute for action, not a spur toward change."

Wow. How often does "shoulding" cause me to be an inactive blob? All the time. Even stuff like the lost things can paralyze me, especially mentally.  Which can push me toward soothing those feelings of loss with food.

Spur toward change. That's my mantra for today. 

Oh, and backup the files.  I have at least learned that lesson.