You should no more piss off the technician about to painstakingly retrieve sixty-five gigabytes of photographs from your dead harddrive than you should hassle the waiter from whom you order French onion soup. You accept their personality flaws unflinchingly, thank them each chance you get, and simply accept the fact that you're at their cruel mercy.

My two-day web absence was fraught with palpitations and serious doubts about the data being intact; wondering if there's a scale to gauge my idiocy for not backing up my photos religiously to the external hard drive I bought precisely to avoid catastrophe, but that sees little use.

In the end, all images were intact and retrieved. To me, they mean the world. To lose them would have found me in a downward spiral.

I should be back to my old blogging routine and responding to email by tomorrow night.