Frogblog

Gone Gone Gone - Part I

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I mean, it wasn’t like I just woke up one morning and discovered it was gone. It just more sort of drifted away while I wasn’t looking. 

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I’m going to tell you a short little story, friends. A story that starts in May, and winds all the way through the summer of 2011. A story about how I lost something important in the weirdest way possible.

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The strangeness begins in mid-May. By the middle of the month, various parts of my life - bits and pieces of things that I had screwed up and/or ignored for several years -  had all fused together to form a giant shitstorm, a deluge of putrid waste that piqued with me spending a night in jail and paying a $1000 fine for insulting an officer of the court. The Tuesday after I was released from jail - the 17th, to be precise - my alarm went off as usual, but to some guy from New England talking about baseball and the Red Sox, instead of the normal classic rock that the syndicated morning shows usually played. I didn’t really pay all that much attention, to be honest. I figured that the local station had probably juggled their schedule or format for whatever reason. I slammed the off button on the radio, and headed off to shower, reminding myself that I needed to tune the damn thing to another station before I went to bed that night.

That was the beginning of the weirdness. The worst was yet to come.

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July 4th. Independence Day. That morning - a Monday, if I recall correctly - I was looking forward to having the day off work. The down time would finally permit me to check out to the Avett Brothers album I had downloaded from Amazon a week earlier, but had been too busy to actually listen to. I was still working on my first cup of coffee as I sat down to my laptop and tried to open the networked media server that held all my music and movies. 

Except  that my networked media server didn’t show up on my network anymore.

First, I figured that a power cable must have came unplugged. Which would make sense, if you overlooked the fact that I could see from my desk that the drive was both plugged in and powered up. 

My next guess was that maybe the server had just lost its network connection - another distinct possibility, since we had experienced a thunderstorm earlier in the week, a fairly violent one that had made the lights flicker on and off a time or two. With that in mind, I rebooted the drive and waited for it to power back up.

Which did the trick. At least partially. After the reboot, I could see the directory that held my movies, sure enough - but all of the music files were gone. Vanished into the ether. 

All I could do was sigh. Best Buy wouldn’t be open on the holiday, so replacing the drive would have to wait. And since all of the files were backed up to a server at my office, I wasn’t terribly worried about the missing tunes. Sure, restoring some 200GB of music files would be a pain, but it wasn’t like I was all that busy anyway. I’d fix everything after we went back to work Tuesday. 

In the meantime, I still had Pandora and my iPod. Not exactly the best set of circumstances, but I would survive. Things were weird, but at least I still had at least some music to listen to. 

Or so I thought.

to be continued…