512 MB DDR of Memory Loss

Good news! Within the last 6 months I have lost a good portion of my last 5 years or so due to unfortuitous circumstances. Oh wait, that's bad news.

To begin with, during the summer the house we were staying in, which had no history of basement flooding, flooded, ruining about half of my collection of books, from school and otherwise. There was my collection of Tom Clancy novels, that had been purchased second hand for the most part. Not a huge loss, certainly not monetarily anyways, but disappointing.

It was the hefty volume of books on religion and politics and other topics that I had collected throughout my time as a student that was the more devastating. Some of these I hadn't done much reading of in the first place, but many of them had been very useful. A copy of Dr. Koyzis' Political Visions and Illusions which I had re-purchased (when I first took the course it wasn't published yet, and I had only a rough Redeemer-bound copy) and had yet to crack open to re-read yet. There was a book by Glenn Tinder called The Political Meaning of Christianity which I ended up wholly disagreeing with, but was the fodder for the best essay I've written. There was a book called In Search of Authentic Faith which I bought prior to coming to university, hoping to use it for a paper at some point, which finally came to fruition in my final year.

Now, more recently, I've had another deletion of my recent history. This past Monday, with the smallish ice storm that we had, my computer ceased to perform its normal function. It turns out my Windows XP was corrupted by an erroneous couple of megabites which had somehow become useless (power surge, though I had a power surge protected bar, or something else, who knows). Now, unfortunately this means that I had to completely reformat my hard drive, which further means I have lost everything from this computer.

All of my schoolwork is gone. However, the papers, the most important part, I still have in hard copies for the most part. I did lose most of my typed notes, some smaller assignments that I didn't bother keeping paper copies of, and probably some other school-related stuff. Luckily I found out that one assignment that I did and only emailed to my professor and required an insane amount of work (and would've required over 30 pages of printed material, thus me not printing) was salvaged thanks to the fact that I had sent it to Dan so he could know what he might be in for in the future.

Media-wise, I've lost all my music, movies, pictures, and everything else. I lost my awesome archer that I built up in Diablo. I lost a number of movies that were relatively difficult to get ahold of. I lost a lot of pictures, though not a whole lot of personal ones, but stuff that won't be recoverable (but thanks to PhotoBucket I have retained some of the more important one). The music is probably the most devastating thing, though. There are some rare songs I found, which are going to be very hard to replace. This is particularly true of my covers list. Who knows if I will be able to find back my version of Ozzie Ozbourne doing Staying Alive, or Holly McNarland doing In The Air Tonight or Marilyn Manson doing Golden Years. Luckily, most of my music and movies are on Dan's external hard drive thanks to some file-sharing done a while back, but most of the rare stuff is gone. Luckily, I didn't have to buy a new computer that I can't afford. But I have had to spend this weekend re-installing my computer and whatnot.

Now, when two events like this happen within a relatively short time, you start to get ideas. I begin to wonder what God might be telling me. No ideas, though. That said, I am strangely comfortable with the whole situation. I would've expected to be lot more upset about losing all of these items, these tokens of the last years. But then again, maybe it is time for a change...