Computer Crashed... Now What?

I had a great weekend. I laughed, played, worked, watched a great movie and ate junk food. Then I worked on a few things last night, played a quick game of Literati on Yahoo, and shut everything down... and of course, straightened my desk in preparation for Monday morning.

This morning, when I got to my desk and popped my laptop open, I got nothing. Nada. Wouldnt boot. Hmm. Tried again. No luck.

Ack!

It's not dead - it just wont load Windows. It gives me an error message about an 'unsuccessful attempt' and reverting to 'last known working configuration'. It won't boot normally, and it won't boot in safe mode. Lovely. ALL of my email, client data and work files are on the laptop - not to mention my entire contact database.

A back-up would be nice right about now, don't ya think? :-]

My most recent back-up is not recent enough. Lesson learned. Okay - so I just closed the laptop and turned around to the desktop. Five minutes later I had Outlook Express (yuck) configured and was back in business. Fortunately, I can remember most of my passwords - and even know who some of the emails were from that I received over the weekend, but didnt get a chance to respond to. So I'm not that far out from recovery. Besides, this is temporary - I'll get the laptop up and running again - or in the worst case, get the data transferred.

What's so odd about this whole situation is that I feel... well, at a loss for what to DO. Usually, Monday mornings are already laid out for me - all of my tasks are in my Inbox, and associated with the messages and files that I have there. Client updates, accounts that need my attention, messages to respond to, etc etc etc.

Now here I sit with a practically clean slate, and only 5 emails in my Inbox. It's WEIRD. As in, almost eerie. LOL

Anything urgent will find it's way back to me - and I intend to have my data back in my hands fairly quick, so I'm not going to stress over anything. Instead, I think I'll take this opportunity to finish up a few projects that I do have access to... which is enough to keep me busy this Monday morning.

And if I run out of things to do, I could always tear into this office and totally rearrange and organize it ;) Not to mention the accounting...

The timing is very ironic, but very very good. It's forcing me out of my normal routine... and steering me straight into my challenge. I'm off - I'm going to see just how many gallons of lemonade I can manage to get out of this lemon! ;)